How I got out of that “Tutorial Purgatory” as a learning developer

Paul Caoile — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 04:50:10 +0000

I want to share with you my journey for overcoming “Tutorial Purgatory.” That need to learn more and to consume every available video tutorials before building anything on my own. The most significant accomplishment I had recently that help me get out of this rut was with being apart of Pass the Pen project. My confidence has improved after this.

First off, A Big thank you to everyone who was involved in this project; this was a team effort. Special mention to Kristopher Van Sant, Dominic Duffin, Ryan Saunders, Antoine Guillien, Cheryl Velez and to others who have contributed in this project. If there are any names I have forgotten here, please do let me know.

Now you might be asking, what is this Pass the Pen project that I'm mentioning here? Well, to put everything into context, Pass The Pen is a collaborative project where the community creates Pens together. Someone starts off a codepen and pass along to continue to build according to a theme chosen.

Here is the original post from Kristopher Van Sant on Pass The Pen. Creator of Pass the Pen Project.

https://codepen.io/KristopherVanSant/post/pass-the-pen

Here is the “Escape Room” project in codepen where you can check it out yourself. I believe the concept of this theme originated from Cheryl Velez.

https://codepen.io/KristopherVanSant/full/dEZZEN

I first came across this project in a codepen newsletter. I badly needed to get out of that “Tutorial Purgatory,” where I heavily rely on project tutorials all the time. I thought the best way to do that is to join a community and start collaborating with other developers.

I have been hesitant because I wasn't sure I could contribute and that my skill level is sub-par. After a month of procrastination, I finally joined the Pass The Pen Project. I incorporated one of the 100 days of CSS Challenge that I have already done and created a puzzle out of it. After a week, I submitted my work, went back and forth with the community in refining it until finally came time to put all the puzzles together.

My wife and I had our second baby, and he was three months old at that time when I decided to join this project. Most of the household responsibility was on me and taking care of his big brother as well. Then there was a period where my kids kept getting sick. There was just so much responsibility to juggle that I was getting overwhelmed.

I wanted to see this project through fruition, so I stuck through despite having difficulty finding the time. I took my time and chimed in the community chat whenever I can. What I admire most in this community was that there's never the pressure of what or when I can contribute.

I had joined other projects before wherein the beginning all was well. But then later slowly losing momentum up to the point where other developers just lost interest, and the project died. I digress here. Let’s get back to the fun stuff.

The last few months is where everything falls into place. Kristopher Van Sant puts together the puzzles into one pen, and we started debugging and testing and refining more and more. We had a great time coming up with new ideas and working out some quirks on some of the bugs found. I had this idea to display locks that would unlock once you have solved a puzzle. I struggled with developing the functionality with the locks because I was making it more complicated than necessary. In the end, I learned to keep it simple. It’s okay to repeat an element or two. What’s important is the outcome and deliverability.

I had a fantastic experience collaborating with these developers, special mention to Kristopher Van Sant @rosieebob and Dominic Duffin @dominicduffin1. If you ever come across them in twitter, do say hi! If you have work with them on some other projects, then you know how excellent they are.

The main takeaway for me being apart of this project was have that patience to stick to it and finish the project no matter the circumstances. Start with what I know and figure out the rest along the way. Stepping out of my comfort zone, not knowing the outcome is something I have to keep reminding myself to do despite having done it before on different circumstances. Having empathy is the foremost skill to have, reciprocating patience, and humility becomes second nature with this. Especially when collaborating with other developers whom you never met. The experience I gained here definitely helped me get better overall and overcome that reliance on tutorials. I will continue to join and contribute to projects when the opportunity comes.

Github credentials for beginners

Paul Caoile — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 15:25:45 +0000

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Today I’m documenting how to enter your GitHub credentials only once for a certain period. This way, you can avoid the tedious operation of entering your username and password every time you push to your GitHub repo. This is especially helpful when you’re working on a remote computer or in the cloud. I do not want to have my password stored in a computer that I don’t own. I value security and by having it cache only for a certain period, gives me a little bit more piece of mind.

We will use a tool available in the Git CLI, called credential helpers. Git credentials authenticate the connection over non-SSH protocols. It informs Git to remember your username and password. Git ships with some default helpers that can be used to achieve this process, avoiding the tedious typing of your username and password when prompted every time you push to your Github repo.

Store – stores your credentials on disk protected only by file permissions.
Cache – stores your credentials in memory for a certain period.
Osxkeychain – if available, will use the OSX Keychain app to fetch the credentials. I believe this is used mostly on Mac.

I will only provide the instruction for cache as this is what I prefer to use. I will try and break down each parameter passed. You can also refer to this Github Help Doc in caching your Github password in Git.

Let’s get to this.

$ git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'
# Set the cache to timeout after an hour

$ git config = is the command used to set Git configuration values on either global or local level.

--global = means you want to apply this configuration to the user’s OS. Global configuration values are stored in a hidden file. One advantage of this is you don’t have to set it again when working with another project on your computer.

credential.helper = tells Git to remember your username and password every time it talks to Github.

‘cache –timeout=3600’ = will store your credentials for an hour.

Well, that is all for now. I will surely be coming back until I memorize this code.

DEV Community: Paul Caoile

How I got out of that “Tutorial Purgatory” as a learning developer

Github credentials for beginners

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash