Introduction
This week we started the Fab Academy. The topics/goals for the week were to:
- get a general understanding of project management, \(\checkmark\)
- start to work with git and gitlab to document and do version management of our work, \(\checkmark\)
- reflect on our time management skills, \(\checkmark\)
- develop web pages using html and/or markdown that include a description of ourselves \(\checkmark\)
- and a sketch of my project. \(\checkmark\)
Final Project and “about me page”
Prior to getting started a quick note to let you know that below you can find a “About me” page were you can learn about my background and a final project page were you can find more about what I plan to do for this experience.
Project Management
I think project management is an important tool for prototype development, it allows to keep track of milestones and the resources needed to achieve them. Also it allows to keep track of projects/tasks that are inputs for other projects, therefore avoiding mobilization of resources when this inputs are not ready. Some tools in project management for tracking tasks and milestones are gant charts. I have have been in projects that have been managed by one or more project managers in past jobs.
As I data analyst I have had some previous exposure to git. We used this tool for version management and to work in the development of factory models. The main idea was that different teams members could roll out modifications for a particular module of the model in which they were working on. These allowed to work with the most up to date version of the project and also allow to roll back to former versions if the new version ended not being a viable alternative. Similarly, branching was an option for untested features were investigated without having to implement them in a main version.
SHH key generation
Since we had to clone our gitlab repository I had to create a SHH key for authentication. For this I followed a great tutorial for mac by Valentin Despa at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qDJ0W1wR5w
The SHH key that was used in the the tutorial RSA defined as:
RSA, short for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, is an asymmetric cryptographic algorithm widely employed to secure network communication. The algorithm uses a pair of keys – a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption. This dual-key system forms the foundation of secure communication, ensuring that the private key remains confidential even if the public key is widely distributed.
from:
The commands used in the terminal follow.
Above, we see that the keys are saved in a hidden directory. The file with the pub extension is the one we should use to connect to our local repository. Using the cat command and id_rsa.pub we can print the key to be entered in Gitlab in order to authenticate our computer. Once we have copied the key we can go to our profile on gitlab and then to the preferences in order to enter the key.
Repository Cloning
I followed a second tutorial from Valentin Despa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lxvVj7wlZw
(base) alfredorios@Alfredos-MacBook-Air Documents % mkdir FabAcademy_Rep
(base) alfredorios@Alfredos-MacBook-Air Documents % cd FabAcademy_Rep
(base) alfredorios@Alfredos-MacBook-Air FabAcademy_Rep % git status
fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git
(base) alfredorios@Alfredos-MacBook-Air FabAcademy_Rep % git init ### Initializing a repository
% git config --global user.email "alfredo.a.rios@gmail.com"
% git config --global user.name "Alfredo RIOS"
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/alfredorios/Documents/FabAcademy_Rep/.git/
(base) alfredorios@Alfredos-MacBook-Air FabAcademy_Rep % git status
On branch main
No commits yet
nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
(base) alfredorios@Alfredos-MacBook-Air FabAcademy_Rep %
git clone git@gitlab.fabcloud.org:academany/fabacademy/2025/labs/cuenca/students/alfredo-rios.gitNote that the location in the last line was taken from gitlab.
The mantra…
Nuking your local repository and resetting untracked files.
Here we can find the commands that can be use to do a hard reset of the local repository
and the commands for resetting untracked files
An additional tip that I implemented is git ingnore, this allows to avoid comiting/pushin a file is local and is only relevant in the local host. One of this file in mac is DS_Store.
https://pineco.de/snippets/globally-gitignore-the-ds_store-file/
Some reflections in regards to git..
I started working on my repository files and I ran in some troubles as I was not methodical in my work. These problems were caused apparently as I had files in gitlab that were not present in my local repository. I think modifying work from both ends before doing a pull or push is not a great idea. I had to do a hard reset and a pull to restore my work.
Another reflection is to keep pushing our local repos constantly as way to ensure that we do not loose any work in the event of computer failure.
Also, it is important to keep repositories light as it saves money, energy and allows fast loading of our web pages. I remember that a data engineering I worked with made point of the cost of running facilities that kept servers that housed data.
Markdown
I have had previous exposure to markdown through R Studio, specifically rmarkdown. Rstudio is a IDE that allows you to write markdown and convert the markdown to an html. This is a different flavor type of markdown which is called rmarkdown as it allows you to embed r code and run it simultaneously as you generate and html document. R is an statistical language and environment. The combination of R with markdown allows you to create reports where you can write code to generate plots run statistics and add combine it with text, tables etc. Below you can find a picture of R studio.
In Rstudio you have 4 windows, one (top left) to store your R code, a console below this window to ran your code interactively. The top right window indicates which variables are committed to memory and the bottom one displays plots.
The typical workflow in Rstudio is to write markdown as in any other markdown application and embed chunks of R code like the one below:
Then press the knitt button (red square in the Rstudio image) which will generate (or knitt) a html page.I found a packages within Rstudio that provides nice templates that were light in the following website.
https://github.com/yixuan/prettydoc?tab=readme-ov-file
In regards to markdown I mostly I used symbols for headers (##) bullet points(-) second level bullet points(4spaces plus a -) and image tags to direct markdown to images that I want to display. I used relative directories as this is to be loaded into the gitlab cloud.
Terminal commands
There is some terminal commands that I usually forget:
vim => reading files, note i will allow you tu insert and :
followed by quit will exit from the editor.
mkdir => create a new directory.
ls => list files.
Time management reflection for this week.
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying searching on the web how to build a navigation bar from rmarkdown and finally gave up, until I decided to avoid this feature. I ended up generating and html page and then adding the navigation bar originally provided in our gitlab repository. This was a good example of serial development as it did not allow me to continue with other parts of this weeks work. Also a good example of Triage as I should have know this was not entirely relevant to the success of this week work.