FUDCon Pune: My session on 'Learning Git'

My session on learning git (slides) was scheduled right after the lunch break on the first day of the FUDCon Pune 2011.

I had targeted the session for beginners; however I had some help from Shakthi, who conducted a session on git during the 2nd FAD and from Ramky who spoke on version control systems in the talk before mine.  So I could skip a few basic things and get right on to the demo.

I didn't really get the luxury to prepare in advance; I had in my mind what I would do in general, but got the slides and the flow ready just the night prior to the talk.  Organising FUDCon wasn't too taxing, but there are a few last-minute things that have to be done, well, at the last minute.  And the presentation, etc., had to wait.

I have earlier seen students just attend sessions but not really follow up on what they were being taught.  So I thought I'd make this an interactive session, inviting people from the audience to participate in the session by someone coming up on the stage and writing a .c program, someone else coming up and creating a git repo, then someone else modifying the code, doing another commit, and so on.

While I thought about this, I recalled Rusty's session at foss.in a few years back where he did such a thing successfully.  Now emulating that feat would be really difficult.  People who have attended Rusty's talks would know what I mean.  He puts in hours and days for such talks.  I'm sure he'd have thought about how to pull it off even if the person to come up on stage wouldn't know how to type.

There were about 50 - 60 people attending the  talk.  So what I did, instead, was to ask the attendees about who knew how to write C programs, and who knew how to type fast.  I called up one such attendee and asked him to write a simple 'Hello, World!' program.

I then called up someone else (Aditya) to commit the first version.  Thankfully, the original C file did not have any punctuation in the 'Hello, World!' string, so the idea for the 2nd commit was ready.  Once Aditya initialised the git repo and did the first commit, I modified the program output to add the comma and exclamation point and make that the 2nd commit in the git repo.  I then moved on to create a new C program that prints out 'Goodbye, World' (we had dedicated the conference to Dennis Ritchie).  This was done in a new branch called 'goodbye'.  Next was to create another branch, called 'fudcon', and write another C program to show 'Hello, FUDCon'.  Then a few lessons on merging, switching branches, viewing commits and logs from other branches followed.  The slides have the list of commands that were shown.

The last step was to clone this repo into another local one, commit a few things there, do a push into the original repo, make some other pulls here and there, and the session participants were ready with hands-on git lessons that they could use.

I had quite a few questions during and after the session, and I even heard of people trying out the examples after the talk. So I'd call the talk/demo a success.