The longest-running inside joke among our team is “Git repos are now live.” It’s the title of an immense email chain started months ago that, even though we use GitHub and Dropbox and Google docs, refuses to die and inadvertently contains lots of documentation. (“Git repos” are GitHub repositories—spaces online where we store code and files.)
So, as we wrap up 2013, we got this little gift from team member Louis Cook, a graphic designer:
At this point, we have a working version of the Solar Sunflower: An Arduino equipped with a WiFi shield sends sensor data to a server. Some of you might be wondering where the code is. The short answer is that it’s at our GitHub repository (more on this shortly). There you can find the Arduino code (a screenshot of it is posted above), the Ruby code for the server, and documentation and revision history. We’ll definitely be discussing the project’s technical issues in this blog, but it isn’t meant to be a documentation of our code. The code is going to change many times over the course of this project, and it isn’t always interesting or productive to list every little change here. Go to GitHub.
If you’re not familiar with GitHub, here’s what we wrote in the FAQ section:
GitHub is a website that hosts files for tech development projects. It’s kind of like Google docs for programmers. GitHub allows multiple people to work on code separately, then merge the changes back into one file. Groups of files (for a certain project, for example) are collected in one location called a repository.