Git

Roger Cheng

Github Seems To Have Stopped Showing STL Changes

A few years ago Github courted the 3D printing crowd by offering a 3D model viewer to see STL files, and then added a feature to visualize differences between revisions of STL files.

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One of the reasons I put Sawppy STLs on Github is for people to see parts in their browser without having to install any software. I thought it would also be cool for people to see parts as they evolved. When I first started playing with putting STL files on Github, I thought this was a great way to track changes across major revisions.

Unfortunately, the revision visualization module seems to be gone. The 3D model viewer is still there so the primary motivation for putting STLs on Github is still good. But when I try to view file changes, the changes are no longer shown. The official help documentation still talks about the feature, it just doesn’t seem to work.

I liked seeing STL diffs visually and it makes me sad the feature is now inaccessible.

Roger Cheng

MPLAB Xpress vs. MPLAB X: Git Source Control

MPLab Xpress IDE LogoI loved the promise of MPLAB Xpress that someday I can do all my PIC development in the cloud. Even in today’s limited form, as long as I stay within certain boundaries I was able to work on PIC programming on a Raspberry Pi! But one downside of keeping the project sources up on Microchip’s servers is that they don’t currently offer any kind of source code version control. I understand why they might not prioritize it for the hobbyist crowd getting started in PIC programming, but version control is something I’ve grown used to having in my software development toolbox. And I occasionally miss being able to review and rewind certain things, even in the relatively simple beginner’s PIC projects that I’ve worked on to date.

MPLAB X logoSo after I inadvertently damaged my MPLAB Xpress Evaluation Board, I decided to graduate to using PIC chips directly without an evaluation board. This meant programming the chip using a PICkit 3 instead of the USB storage-based programmer on the evaluation board. And lastly – it also means leaving the web browser-based MPLAB Xpress and moving over to the NetBeans-based MPLAB X IDE installed and executed locally. One result is that the project files are now on my computer, which means I can bring git into the picture!

Obviously git can handle the C source files that I will be working with. What’s less obvious are the other data files in a MPLAB X project. What is worth tracking in version control, and what are easily regenerated as needed? Such information are usually described in a .gitignore file, but Github’s .gitignore collection does not include one for working in MPLAB X.

Fortunately, the MPLAB community has assembled one and it looks OK to me at first glance. I first dipped my toes using a project that was already complete, pushing it up to Github for archiving the sources. It also allowed me to test that all critical information is preserved, by deleting the directory and “git clone” anew to verify MPLAB X is happy with everything and didn’t complain about files missing from the project.

The second trial run incorporated git from the start, tracking changes along the way so I could see what was boilerplate generated by the tools and separate them from the (quite trivial) code I actually wrote. This test is also successful.

And now, trial run number three: take all the 7-segment LED control code I’ve been working on in MPLAB Xpress and translating them into a MPLAB X project in a way that tracks all the individual tasks along the way.

Roger Cheng

The other “cloud development”

When I set out on this adventure, I knew I wanted to eventually cover the basics of the major cloud services. Write some sample services to run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google cloud services, etc.

I was surprised to stumble into an entirely different meaning of “cloud development”: writing code in a browser. I had seen the educational coding playgrounds of Codecademy, and I had seen small trial tools like JSFiddle, but I had no idea that was just the tip of the iceberg and things can get much fancier.

I had started a project to practice my newly-learned jQuery skills. Just with a text editor on my computer and running the HTML straight off the file system. As soon as I learned of these web-based development environments I wanted to try it out by moving my project over.

The first I tried was Codenvy, whose whitepapers are quite grandiose in what it offers for improving developer productivity. Unfortunately the kind of development Codenvy supports aren’t the kind of things I know anything about today. But I’ll revisit in a few weeks to check again.

The second I tried was Cloud 9, which does support simple HTML+CSS+JS projects like what I wanted to do. Working in Cloud 9 gave me some tools for static analysis and serving my file off a real web server. It also integrates into Github preserving my source control workflow.

After a JavaScript project of around 300 lines of code, I can comfortably say I’m quite impressed. In the areas of development-time tooling and integration experience, it far exceeded my expectations. However, there was an area of disappointment: the debugging experience was either hard to find or just wasn’t there at all.

When my little project goes awry, I resorted to loading up the project in a separate browser window and using the web browser debugger. This is on par with the simpler tools like JSFiddle and JSBin. I had hoped for better.

I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll find a tool with better debugging experience as I continue to explore.

Roger Cheng

Codecademy “Learn Git” notes

While fiddling with my HTML experiments, I start feeling the need to keep different versions around and the desire to undo experiments (successes and failures both.)

I hadn’t planned to dive into version control for a while longer, but this is enough of a motivation for me to dive in starting with the Codecademy “Learn Git” class.

This class has significantly less hand-holding than the last few Codecademy classes I took, and almost no repetition. It also doesn’t go into a reasons why you are doing what you are doing in a class. As a result, I felt this class would not be a good introduction for a raw beginner.

To successfully complete this class, the student needs to:

  • Be comfortable with a command line.
  • Already know why you’d want to use version control.
  • Navigate the in-class environment without instructions.

The last one was annoying. At one point in the class, the student is expected to open a file in the virtual work environment to be edited, but there was no instruction on how to do so.

The class worked perfectly for me – I could handle the above bullets, and the lack of repetition meant I was never bored. The lack of hand-holding meant I had to occasionally look up git commands on my own, or hunt around the UI of the work environment, but it wasn’t bad. I’m just not sure it’s good starting place for a coding beginner.

Setting aside the class material for now: the class implementation was interesting. I had expected the class learning environment to be merely a facade. Something that only accepts text input in the exact order required in the instructions. It turns out not to be the case – it appears to be a real (though restricted) instance of bash, connected to (a limited set of) git commands. I could issue any valid commands in the environment, and they would run!

Of course, if I veer off the course I couldn’t go to the next step, but I was impressed that they have created a sandbox for the student to play in.