Tomorrow, Saturday 5th October 2019, I'm going to run a workshop in Edinburgh to introduce programmers in my area to Git and Github Pull Requests.
It's gathered some modest interest - I posted the event on the TechMeetup mailing list, where a professor said he'd share it with the university computer science groups, and with the Edinburgh Linux User Group mailing list, where I seem to have gotten both participants and volunteer assistants.
The question then was, how to run it? It wouldn't do to give a brief pep talk, and set people on their way on arbitrary projects... I have delivered git training at my company when we were migrating from SVN to git, but those sessions were 4-hour long. I couldn't run a workshop thay long for a casual event...!
The answer to the first question then was to write the presentation notes, tutorial and exercises as a repo that the participants themselves will PR against as their first PR... and the second concern boiled down to: let's not get too far down in the weeds, let's just explicitly cover what we're here for, namely forking, cloning, pushing, and making a PR. No explaining branching models, hashes and the likes. Just the basics.
Of course during the session we'll get into the weeds, and I've offered to continue to provide dedicated help through a Riot.im channel (because, use open source, you know!).
Final cherry on the cake: it's easily adaptable for anybody use and run their own workshop. I've licensed it and all - and included instructions to boot.
Here's to a hopefully successful session...
EDIT: The session was a success!
I updated the repo with the feedback I received, and it is ready to be run by anybody. I might even offer to run it at OggCamp 2019 in Manchester. If you're interested in the details, hit me up when there!
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