GitHub

I recently created a sprite API library for TypeScript and decided that I wanted to make it open source. Maybe give myself some more programmer cred. Since GitHub seems to be the coolest place these days to put open source code I decided to try it out. Perhaps I was a bit naive, but I thought it would be pretty simple to do. I figured I would just go up to the website and upload a few files and voila, I'd have an open source repository. Boy was I wrong.

It was pretty easy to set up an account and create a new code repository. But then I couldn't find any way to add files to it. You can add new files, but you can't upload existing files from the web site. After much research I realized that you need to install Git (an open source version control system) on your computer and use that to manage the files.

GitHub actually has a GUI for Git that makes it easier to use. I installed it but it didn't work. The process would start but then die a few seconds later. So then I decided to go install Git directly and do it the old fashioned way. Git is primarily a command line tool, but it does have a simple GUI with it. That did work but it took a while to figure out how to fetch and commit and push files. It's a completely different process than I'm used to as we use Perforce where I work.

Finally, after many hours, I did get my code files up on GitHub and am getting the hang of it. But what I thought would take an hour at most turned into many hours and a lot of learning new things. I ended up putting up two repositories which you can find here: https://github.com/jodymgustafson?tab=repositories