This post deals with the first assignment called First Flight for which we were asked to create a few accounts, install software, and more broadly get accustomed to some HFOSS tools.

The first thing to do was to connect to an IRC channel, which gives you the opportunity to chat with the other people that joined this channel. This is a useful tool for communicating informally with other developers. It can be used via command line, web client or desktop client. In class, I’ll use the freenode web client and I’ve chosen to install HexChat on my laptop. Just like on this blog, my IRC nickname is ymoullec.

The second thing to do was to subscribe to a RIT mailing list, and to introduce yourself to the other subscribers. This list will be dedicated to more formal ways of communicating between people participating to HFOSS.

Then comes the HFOSS journal. This journal is an informal way to put my thoughts on paper (or almost paper), thoughts which are shared with the instructor, but which aren’t available to the public. It requires a daily entry and provides the content used to fill these blog posts. From a technical point of view, this journal is a simple GitLab repository containing a README.md file which itself contains all entries in descending chronological order.

Then onto what you’re currently reading : a blog. This is more of a challenge as it’s not something I’ve already done in the past. To create my blog, I first tried to use WordPress. I created an account and started customizing my blog’s look. But my I got to choosing a domain name, it seemed that none of the options available was free of charge. Thus, I deleted my account and went for the GitHub Pages option. A GitHub page consists in turning a GitHub repository into a website. Also, Jekyll offers a very simple way to turn markdown files into a blog using GitHub Pages. It still might still need some customizing but this blog is now online and ready to be used.

Finally, it was time to share this blog with the class using GitHub. That meant forking the class’s repository, adding a YAML file that references this blog, pushing it to GitHub and issuing a pull request. As I’m not yet super familiar with the fork/pull request mechanism, I first looked at some tutorials on how exactly all this is supposed to be done. The first mistake I did was to confuse cloning with forking. I deleted the local clone of the class’s repository and started looking at a standard fork/pull request workflow. To sum up, this workflow consists in forking the repository directly on GitHub’s website (click on the fork button). This creates a copy of the repository on your GitHub account and lets you do the modifications you need to do (here, I just added a YAML file, committed, and pushed). Then once again, you just have to go to your fork’s page on GitHub and submit a new pull request.

And that’s it for the first flight.