How We Use GitHub
Caleb Eby How we use the code hosting site GitHub, and how we plan to improve how we use it in the upcoming year.
About GitHub
GitHub is free hosting for projects using Git. Git is a source code manager which lets you go through the history of your project, and if you ever make a mistake, you can diff between two versions of files and see exactly what changed. It also lets multiple people collaborate on one project without overwriting each other's changes.
GitHub is free for open source projects, which is how we use it.
Open Source
Anyone can view our robot code online, even without an account. We chose open source because we want people to be able to contribute to and learn from our code.
Branches
In Git, branches are copies of the code, each with some changes from the master branch. Branches are often created for new features, and once the feature is complete, the feature branch is merged with the master branch. Although we haven't used branches for the 2016 robot code, we hope to use them more next year because it reduces the likelihood of something breaking. Branches are very useful with larger groups, because that way people can be working on different features without messing up each other's code.
Our Code
You can see our 2016 FRC Code here. Our 2015 Bunnybots code is available on GitHub, too.