In his last few posts, Ryan’s written about GitHub Education, and introduced us to a method for creating an online syllabus using Markdown, RStudio, and GitHub Pages.
I’ve recently begun using GitHub Pages myself. A few months ago, I started working my way through the front-end development curriculum at freeCodeCamp (which I’ve really been enjoying). One of the tools that freeCodeCamp suggests people use is CodePen, but learners may post their projects elsewhere if they wish, provided their code is also viewable.
Since I’d already heard plenty about GitHub and knew it was something I wanted to learn more about, I decided I was going to post my work there instead of at CodePen. I read through Gene Kobilansky’s helpful explanation to get the idea, then set up my preferred working environment, Coda 2, to work with GitHub (I found this writeup helpful in getting started).
It took me a bit to get up and running, but once I did, I had a good working environment on my laptop.
Sometimes, though, I want to work on something when I’m away from home. In those cases, I quite often don’t have my laptop with me — but I do usually have my iPad in tow. So I began exploring ways to update my projects from the iPad.
It turns out that there’s a very easy way to do that, outlined by Giacomo Lawrance at The Nerdy Student. Working Copy is a Git client that works with a number of hosting services, including GitHub. Textastic is a text editor with syntax highlighting (and even code completion, in come cases). They work very well together, making it easy to update repositories on the go for a reasonable price (Textastic is $9.99; it costs $14.99 to unlock Working Copy’s ability to push changes to GitHub — otherwise, all commits are local).
Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Yuichiro Masui