Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 13th September 2024.

This was my first full week as Katie’s buddy. We covered:

• setting up a GPG key
• the differences between a GPG key and an SSH key
• signing commits
• the pros and cons of HTTP and SSH for communicating with a remote repository
• a couple of useful key bindings; Ctrl-l (clear screen) and Ctrl-r (reverse search history)
• piping to xclip (not bad for week one!)

I was pleased we talked about empirical method (“hypothesis-driven development”). Katie seemed to embrace it! We used it to test that Katie could sign her commits, although this took longer than it should have taken because I misunderstood GitHub’s UI.

I decided to learn more about Tig this week. I got confused, because Tig wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. But then I realised that I was thinking of it as a tool you open once per session, when I should have been thinking of it as tool you open many times per session, once for each task. I set up a couple of useful key bindings, nonetheless.

Getting confused prompted me to learn more about revision selection and to find a well-hidden page in the Git docs called “gitrevisions”. ^ and ~ started to make more sense, which meant git log started to make more sense too.

Finally, I learnt more about Git internals (Chapter 10 of Pro Git). Understanding Git references better helped me work out why git branch didn’t report the branch name, but git status did, for a newly-initialised repository. Katie spotted the discrepancy when we were testing that she could sign her commits. Thanks, Katie!