User blog:Taldin/Tinker's Blog, Part 3: Branches and Additions

A short update, since I just made a short edit to my code to shorten the values that the party health modification was doing -- I discovered that 45.99999999999999 was not an acceptable value to display for a party member's health. (Today I learned that you can add .toFixed(1) to a string in Jade to truncate its value.)

No pull request ever gets answered right away. It's the nature of being a volunteer Blacksmith, in that you can make change requests, but some of the official code maintainers have to be the ones to look at it and make sure it doesn't break Habitica for everyone. (Because that would be bad.)

Github is a source control system; one of the coolest epiphanies I found out was that your local installation is yours to tinker with up until the point that you send up a pull request.

This is why you want to use branches. Branches are like snapshots of code that is off in its own pocket universe sandbox. You can change anything you want in a branch and it won't affect anything else; if you flip the selector back to 'develop', all of your changes on your branch are reverted back to the baseline (develop). As soon as you flip the branch back to your branch-in-progress, you get all of your changes back.

If you discover a need to (or are requested to) update your pull request, you can flip to your branch, make changes, and then go to your Gitshell window and type 'git push'' to push the latest changes up to the online repository. It will be added to your existing pull request.

To sum up:
 * Always make a branch for your work before you start coding.  Never code off of develop, because everyone else starts from that copy.
 * First instance of a merge request: use the Pull Request button (asking the devs to pull your code into the  main branch)
 * Second and further instances: use 'git push'
 * When your branch has been merged (watch the pull request report for it), use 'git branch -d' to get rid of the branch, since you don't need it anymore.