Lukasz Jablonski lukaszjablonski

Whether you're trying to give back to the open source community or collaborating on your own projects, knowing how to properly fork and generate pull requests is essential. Unfortunately, it's quite easy to make mistakes or not know what you should do when you're initially learning the process. I know that I certainly had considerable initial trouble with it, and I found a lot of the information on GitHub and around the internet to be rather piecemeal and incomplete - part of the process described here, another there, common hangups in a different place, and so on.

In an attempt to coallate this information for myself and others, this short tutorial is what I've found to be fairly standard procedure for creating a fork, doing your work, issuing a pull request, and merging that pull request back into the original project.

Creating a Fork

Just head over to the GitHub page and click the "Fork" button. It's just that simple. Once you've done that, you can use your favorite git client to clone your repo or j

Software for scientists

Some things takes much less time and stress once you know the right tool. Below, there is a community edited list of software for scientists.

Text editors

in General purpose text/code editors. It may be better to have a good editor for everything, than different ones for different languages, scripts, notes.

$ git checkout --orphan NEWBRANCH
$ git rm -rf .

--orphan creates a new branch, but it starts without any commit. After running the above command you are on a new branch "NEWBRANCH", and the first commit you create from this state will start a new history without any ancestry.

You can then start adding files and commit them and they will live in their own branch. If you take a look at the log, you will see that it is isolated from the original log.

General context

A static website using a generator (like Jekyll)
Comments are in a folder, one comment = one JSON file (attached to article based on path + filename)
website is versionned using git, repository hosted by github (cool for pull-requests)

Posting a new comment

OK here we need some dynamism ;)

Project Name

TODO: Write a project description

Installation

TODO: Describe the installation process

	#' Install/update necessary packages from CRAN, Bioconductor, GitHub, or local sources
	#'
	#' @param file a file with packages; overrides packages parameter
	#' @param packages a vector of strings with names of packages from CRAN, Bioconductor, GitHub
	#' @param updatePackages whether to update existing packages (Default: FALSE)
	#' @param dryRun whether to test for missing packages (Default: FALSE)
	#'
	#' @example
	#' \dontrun {
	#' source("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/cannin/6b8c68e7db19c4902459/raw/installPackages.R")

	Each YouTube video has 4 generated images. They are predictably formatted as follows:

	http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/0.jpg
	http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/1.jpg
	http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/2.jpg
	http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/3.jpg

	The first one in the list is a full size image and others are thumbnail images. The default thumbnail image (ie. one of 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg) is:

	http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/default.jpg

	cd repository
	git checkout --orphan orphan_name
	git rm -rf .
	rm '.gitignore'
	echo "#Title of Readme" > README.md
	git add README.md
	git commit -a -m "Initial Commit"
	git push origin orphan_name

	(function(){

	var button_id = "download"

	// include this code in your page
	// you must have jQuery installed
	// you must have a link element with an id of "download"
	// this is limited to only one chart on the page (the first)
	function encode_as_link(){
	// Add some critical information