Finally learning how to use Git is like…..woah. Like, learning how to use it beyond a super simple workflow in private repos of adding -> committing -> pushing or copying Bash commands given by my professors. The thing I learned in class that has benefitted me the most, although this is related to Bash not Git, is that adding & to the end of a command that starts a process makes it run as a background process. I’ve been using this so that I can preview the website which contains the blog by running “jekyll serve &”, and now I don’t have to end the process if I need to run other Bash commands. It also helps because I created an alias to open STM32CubeIDE, which I can now run as a background process as well!

I think I’m going to start using Git with my music, so that I can edit the project files without worrying about if it’s going to end up worse or not. On some level, I do feel like having access to such a large-scale undo operation could end up detrimenting my creative workflow in that getting rid of the limitation of only being able to move forward might make me opt for safer decisions. Despite this, I think it’ll be very useful for more technical things, like the mixing and mastering process. I also might use it if I’m working on a project I haven’t touched in like years or something.

Looking at more possible projects to contribute to, I still think I’m most interested in contributing to Blender. I am a longtime user of the program, going on about 5 years now, on and off. Wow, I did not realize I started using Blender so long ago!! That’s crazy. However, I’m also interested in Exercism, since I like teaching people things and I think it would be fun to design or improve coding exercises to help people learn concepts.

I came into this course expecting to contribute to some open source embedded system/firmware project, like Arduino or FreeRTOS or something, but given that we will be picking the projects to contribute to as groups, I don’t think this will happen, since embedded firmware is a less popular career path in the computer science major. I expect the biggest challenge of working on an open source project to be working outside of my main skillset of embedded C development. However, I’m excited about that being an opportunity to practice C++ or C for non-embedded contexts! Like, I never even really touch dynamic memory allocation in embedded. I tend to tunnel vision a bit, and now I’m kind of set on contributing to Blender, since it’s primarily written in C++ and I use the program regularly.