fac-13.github.io

fac-13 blog @ https://fac-13.github.io/

PROPOSAL

NOTE - If any fac-13rs or mentors / organisers disagree with the proposal then I will remove the repo asap! Just thought the quickest way to get discussion going might be to get a README.md up and running.
NOTE - As it is quite late in the day for fac-13 I see this proposal as more of an experiment to see how the idea works and whether it might be a useful method for future facs.

WHAT

Set up a fac-13 blog to sit on github pages running as either an ‘org’ site (as it is set up presently) or as a ‘project’ site (if people prefer…)
Use Jekyll static site generator to publish collaboratively: collaborators add markdown files to the _posts folder and commit-master to publish
The blog is easily accessible at the url ‘fac-13.github.io’ (or slightly different if a ‘project’ page set-up)
Create a nice theme if we feel like it…

WHY

We have talked a lot at recent Friday SGCs about how best to store and share our learning. The research repo is an excellent resource (with loads of excellent contributions mainly from Tamara and Matthew) but:

while adding important discoveries etc. to the repository issues is useful, code snippets, situation walkthroughs, reports on problems and solutions etc. are not really issues…
while adding issues on a repo from the comand-line is not impossible, it requires adding new interfaces and, I assume, learning new commands etc. see this.
because the research repo is just another repo: a) we tend not to put things in it which are to be found in other repos - what is the point of reproducing information already stored somewhere else in github? and b) it is more or less as indistinguishable as all the other repos - it is found by navigating from some start point like a starred repository etc.

But the reason for having a resource like this is to make really useful information both as accessible and as easy to create and publish as possible. Having a distinct site/url offering a different interface from the usual github thing, and making adding new items to the list as easy as adding a new markdown file to the _postsfolder and committing to master (maybe after a pull request…) might be a better way to do this.

Dotted around the FAC coursebook there are loads of walkthroughs of tasks that we have to perform relentlessly but which are hard to remember (because there are lots of stages or options, or because we have so many different things to set up overall for each project) - these are a pain to find and many of them could also be improved. It would be excellent to have them all in a centralised resource so that when we are in the middle of seting up a project and need to reassign a postgres user to a differnt DB, for example, we can just find the snippets we need immediately. And when we learn a good way to go about setting up Heroku, AWS or Azure etc. (as we might do in the course of the upcoming projects), we need a go-to place to submit a walkthrough. It would also be brilliant to have a place for us to build resources specific to the roles we are going to be implementing in the coming weeks; good stuff for the Dev Ops or UX team-members to know about etc.

Through a careful use of tagsand categoriesetc. it should be pretty easy to create a rich but accessible resource that we all can benefit from and which might provide a lot of useful material for when we are thinking about developing content for fac-14. PLUS it would be really good experience for us to be blogging as developers about what we know and learn…

I am not an expert on Jekyll but I think it should be pretty simple for us all to be able to collaboratively publish ‘posts’ and to build site utilities (like filter posts by tag or show all the categories etc.) using the templating language which is very similar to handlebars.

I think I have gone on enough now - I look forward to hearing your thoughts: as I say, if the response is negative then I will take the repo down, and obvs we should discuss doing this in different ways if people want to do that as well…

Hxx