Baby’s First Development Post

September 4, 2013

“Hello World” is too cliche.

This is going to be a blog chronicling my experiences as a developer and designer.

What spurred the creation of this blog? My class at Rochester Institute of Technology, “Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development.” As you might guess, the class covers the best practices and processes of creating software for others to contribute to and use under licenses such as GPL, BSD, or MIT.

As part of the first assignment, the creation of a blog is required. I’ve been wanting to create a blog for a long time, but I believe I suffer from a disease known as “lazy college student”.

Another part of the assignment is to fork a repo on Github and contribute to it. I think this is a great exercise. Git is very powerful software which is essentially industry-standard; being able to use it is important for jobs in the development field.

I recently migrated my website off of shared hosting to a Linode VPS. I love it! To create the blog (and complete the assignment). I know a fair bit about web development, but setting up WordPress with nginx was definitely new to me:

 

After creating the blog, the next step was to contribute to the repo. It was easy, since we simply had to create a new file with proper formatting. Git makes it easy for everyone in the class to contribute without screwing everything up. A couple quick commands and it’s done: