I have had a GitHub account since March 6, 2013, but I never used it until much later in 2016.

I started working on a list of places to eat when I traveled and using GitHub to backup/store my code.

First GitHub Use

My first use of GitHub was on September 30, 2016, when I created my first repro for the place to eat project. At some point, I purchased the domain name GottaEatHere.com to put the information on. I bought a bunch more domains because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to call the application.

Reason for Using GitHub

The reason I started the project was for the An Event Apart and Microsoft 10K Apart contest. Besides, people had been asking me for recommendations of where to eat. So I figured I build a small web-based application to kills two birds with one stone. The contest was where people had to build an application in less than 10 kilobytes (KB) of code.

I spent some time upfront figuring out how best to do that. I wanted to learn PHP or at least get better at it, so that’s where I started.

Planning the Application

My first thoughts were I would need two or three Kb for CSS. Then another three Kb for my HTML template, and the remaining Kb for logic to render the pages content.

I decided to use JSON files because I wasn’t sure if a database would count against the total of 10 Kb. Which allowed me to learn something else new too.

I worked to get my PHP application to render a list of five or six cities, and I think five restaurants I loved going to. Each city had its know JSON file, and they were half Kb in size or something like that.

The 10 Kb or less version of the application had a lot less information per city and restaurant. I think it had a name, address, phone number, URL, and a short description. Now it has a bunch o other information.

A person chooses a city was from a drop-down list. Then the PHP would read the JSON file for the city that a person picked. Then render the restaurants for that city. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. I didn’t expect to win anything, and I didn’t.

Of course, the whole time, I was making sure it was as accessible as possible.

Using GitHub Daily

On November 18, 2016, I started making more commits to add more places to eat along with more cities, along with information.

November 18th was the day I started making at least one commit or added an issue to GitHub every day. It might have been for new fields, cities, states, etc., to GitHub every day.

Over the last four and a half or so years, I have only missed doing something on GitHub about a dozen times. So that works out to three or four times a year. I’m okay with that and don’t lose sleep over it if I do. Some of the updates and issues were related to my slides, and others were for code examples for the slides.

My use of GitHub is still through their desktop application. It lets me create new repro’s, create issues for new features, cites, restaurants, etc.

With only me working on the projects, I have not had to worry about creating branches, merging others’ code, etc. At some point, I need to learn how to do that through the application or the command line.

Need to Learn More Git

So here’s to learning more Git. Be it through the GitHub application or, more importantly, through the command line.