ux-portfolio-adiiulio

A struggle with GitHub

For my second UX journal I decided to write about a platform that we have to use for this class specifically. I am talking about GitHub.

Before this class I had only heard about it, all my classmates back home consistently used it both for sharing code and taking notes in class. Occasionally I had to open a GitHub link for a reason or another, but I never had my own account, let alone post anything. I think everyone can agree that the platform is a bit confusing, and the first time I used it I had to ask for help. I don’t know if I would have been able to do it by myself.

To understand how confusing it is for me to use GitHub let’s walk through the writing process of this journal entry itself.

First, I am logged into my team’s profile, meaning that now I have to go to my profile page and to do this I would click on my profile icon situated on the upper right side of the screen, but by clicking on that a dropdown menu appears. My first instinct would be to click on my username, but this brings me to the following page, which is currently not what I am looking for, since I am trying to find the page where I uploaded my first UX journal entry. It is important to note that I didn’t even read the other options that I had on my dropdown menu since I just followed my natural mapping. I guess this is an example of how a user never actually searches for the proper way to complete a task but follows whatever their instinct is based on previous experience with similar websites as well as simply guessing what a shortcut would do. Yes, I am thinking to deeply about this instead of focusing on my goal so let’s go back to what I was trying to do.

Since I know by previous experience that by searching GitHub on google I am redirected by the suggested link to the page I am looking for I will do that, even if I would have been happier to find a way to do it from the ReaderHub page. To be honest, I still have no clue if there is actually a way to do it from there or I was just searching for something that doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, I finally found the page I was looking for.

Now, how do I upload another entry? I recall doing this before for the ReaderHub project, but I absolutely do not remember how to do it. Does this mean that the website is not learnable enough or that I am just dumber than the rest of the people who use it? Since I do like to think about myself as an average person in the intelligence department, but I also don’t want to blame a platform that everyone seems to like so much, let’s just blame the fact that I only use GitHub in this class and move on with our lives.

I tried to click on the pencil icon that allows me to modify the main text under the title UX portfolio and I tried to imitate the thing I had done for the previous journal entry, which would look something like this [title of this entry] (j02/). This didn’t work since the outcome after I clicked on “commit changes” was this:

As I was repeating the process to take a screenshot of it though, I noticed something: I had put a space between [title] and (j02/). Maybe this is the issue? I went ahead and deleted that space and guess what? It looks like it worked since the journal entry title now shows up as a link. Still, I think I spoke to early since the thing that shows up when I click on that link is this following page.

Now I am kind of discouraged but I have to submit this assignment somehow so I must find a way. I remember from last time that I did something to create a folder that contained the readme to modify in order to upload the text, so I know that there is a way to do it.

The first journal shows up as a blue folder on top of the page, so I would assume I have to create the same thing for j02.

I notice right above those blue folders that there is a button that reads “add file” so I click on that and I am redirected to this page which I fill out with “j02” as the name of the file and readme.md as the content. I assume this is not the proper way to do it because the j02 now shows up with the icon of a page instead of the blue folder. To be honest, now the only thing I would like to do is look up how to do it, especially because I recall that this process was explained in class. Unfortunately, if I don’t take notes I am very bad at retaining information, so I do not remember how to do it. Even more unfortunately, I am very stubborn so now I want to do this by myself.

So, I don’t think that this is completely wrong because now if I click on the link that I had previously created I am redirected to the j02 that I just created, even if it is not exactly right. Now the thing is, how do I delete what I just did? I have no idea. Yet, I think I found the way to create the folder since I clicked on “go to file” and I was able to see that all of the folders had the following path: “name/README.md”. Obviously it won’t let me create a file named j02 since I already have one with that name. This means that the only thing that I have to do now is to delete the old j02 file and create a new one. Which means I am almost done but it also means that I am completely stuck.

If I try to right-click on the file I do not see any options that say something along the lines of “delete”. At this point I really don’t know what to do so I just decided to cheat and google how to do it. Turns out, if you click on the file there is a bin icon that lets you delete it, so now I can complete my mission and create the right j02 and finally turn this in.

As you can see, I succeeded even if I am now completely exhausted, and I feel like I have made this harder on myself than it should have been. GitHub is an extremely useful platform and I can see how so many people are comfortable in using it and can navigate it with ease, but I think everyone can agree that the first times can be a bit tricky to understand, and even if I had gone through these actions before, I feel like they are not easy to remember. Long story short, my relationship with GitHub is quite troubled, I hope that sooner or later I will be able to use without much difficulty, but as you can see it is going to take a bit more practicing.