Github Pages Portfolio Course - Session 3 v1.6 13 April 2016

The focus of the third session of the Github Pages Portfolio Course is the installation of a node based tool chain, the use of yeoman to scaffold projects and the use of the gulp-gh-pages gulp plugin to deploy the website to gh-pages. There is a bit of review for some workflow sections of session 1 and session 2 where students create a new git project from scratch and create a Jekyll blog post from scratch. Like session 1 and session 2 of this class this class that is entirely hands on. By the end of the session, students have a great understanding of the ends and outs of Jekyll and have a fully functional github portfolio including projects source code AND live projects hosted there as well.

The big thing I hope students get out of this is basic git workflow, the identification of tool chain patterns (all tool chains have package managers, task runners, etc) and the ability to navigate new technologies based on these patterns. The initial response to the class has been really good and I look forward to teaching it again and helping out my fellow Free Code Campers!

Topics in this class include:

  1. The importance of class metrics - I will shame you into learning…

  2. Git gh-pages review - A touch of review on gh-pages and how projects repo and your personal repo are different.

  3. Yeoman and project Scaffolding - Scaffolding new projects with yo saves tons of time and makes development easier.

  4. Node.js - What the heck is node.js?

  5. Comparing the Nodejs toolchain and the Ruby toolchain - We now know something about the ruby toolchain - how does the node.js toolchain compare and contrast?

  6. nvm - Node Version Manager - We like rvm; we learn to love nvm.

  7. npm - installing packages is fun… wait.. what is that error???

  8. yeoman is amazing - Packages are fun but yeoman generators are even better.

  9. The DRY prinicple - Keeping it DRY is the secret to maintainable software.

  10. Gulp, gulp plugins & gulp-gh-pages - Let’s add functionality to our new build process to integrated it with github.

  11. Jekyll post creation and github project creation review - Now do everything you have learned… on your own!

Here is a link to the Session #3 Presentation.