Have you ever felt anxious trying to find a “final-final-edited-version4” file in a sea of “final”s and “version”s? Or maybe you were asked by your supervisor to go back and work on a previous version of your project file. The answer is most likely a “yes”. We often face dilemmas trying to understand the edits that you or your teammates have done to certain files throughout the project timeline and why particular decisions were taken midway to change the game plan. This often pauses the ongoing actions of the team since now they have to go back to square one and work their way up while manually recording every review and change. Hence tracking the versions of files in a directory is a much needed facility especially for data evangelists of today. This is why we, the Statistics Society of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura decided to take the plunge to start making our aspiring Statisticians’ lives easier by introducing to them the world of Git.
Git fundamentals session was held on the 18th of July, 04:00 PM onwards via Zoom with over 100 participants arriving to learn about Git and how to start using it for their own projects. The speaker of the session was Mr. Adithya Narasinghe (Deep Learning Engineer at labml.ai, Consultant Software Engineer at oDoc) who took an unconventional approach in making the session fun and engaging to all its participants. The session started off by him explaining why git is necessary, with the reason being that tracking the version of your documents and files is essential to reduce unnecessary clutter and to understand the changes made to the versions of your document. Then a fun, interactive kahoot session organized by him tested the knowledge of the audience based on what he had discussed, where most of the participants gave correct answers and scored points. He pointed how everyone has at some point used version controlling systems such as Google Docs or Google Slides etc. even without explicitly knowing what they were. And finally he ended his insightful workshop with a hands-on session on setting up git and connecting to github to perform a variety of tasks from committing changes to making pull requests on github.
We thank Mr. Adithya Narasinghe from the bottom of our hearts for accepting our invitation and choosing to educate an aspiring audience and inspire them to discover new approaches to upgrade their workflows. Our gratitude also extends to the Senior Treasurer of the society, Dr. Rajitha Silva for consistently inspiring and encouraging us to take risks and be daring in the journey of distributing this much needed knowledge. Moreover, we thankfully acknowledge the immense support given by Mr. Janith Wanniarachchi,, the President of the Statistics Society who not only moderated the session by creating an interactive space between the speaker and the audience but guided us through the entire process to ensure a seamless execution of the project. This project would not have acquired this level of success if it weren’t for the dynamic team that includes Mr. Rajitha Lakshan, Ms. Rashmi Jayasekara and Ms. Chalani Pradeepika, who committed diligently behind the scenes to ensure the triumph that we have achieved. We are indebted to all their support and commitment throughout the project and beyond.
And finally, we thank all fellow data enthusiasts who participated in this insightful session and who keep motivating us to do what we do!
Slides are available at;
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UARBFWynWp_trK7ty16jv7H1fAmc50C3FVTvcEzKObo/edit?usp=sharing
Written by : Maleesha Panangala
Editor
Statistics Society of University of Sri Jayewardenepura
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