I’m catching up by posting my day two post on the morning of Day 3. Yesterday we spent a ton of time on Git and Github, as well as setting up our environment and getting plenty of practice with BASH. Most of this came fairly easily, though with Git it took me a while to even start to understand the differences between merging and rebasing.

My understanding is that when you create a new branch to work on a feature, other things can happen to the master branch while that feature is still being worked on (like other features or fixes being merged in). If you were to merge a feature in after many changes have happened to the master branch you can run into some conflicts when you try and merge the new branch in. These situations can sometimes be mitigated by rebasing the branch instead, removing it from the branch continuity and placing it back on top of the master branch. My understanding of exactly how this works is still a little incomplete, but I believe it does something like catch the base code up to current for the branch and then add the new feature changes rather than attempting to merge two complete sets.

I’ve also decided that I want to do some (completely unqualified) self expirimentation and research into some of the non-computer related aspects of coding. Yesterday after about hour 9 or 10 of coding I started to hit a wall where it was ‘hard’ to think and I was having to look up simple commands that I know off the top of my head normally. I was also becoming more frustrated more quickly when I ran into issues. I think of this as ‘brain fatigue’ and would like to see how different factors like sleep, diet and exercise affect this over my time at Flatiron. Hopefully I’ll find some ways to combat this issue that I imagine is being run into by more folks than myself.