Extra Fundamentals

Interesting things to learn on your semester break

Hey university students, want to learn some interesting tools and technologies during your semester break? Here's a list

Lim Xing Zhi

Dec 4, 2021 — 5 min read

Hey university students, want to learn some interesting tools and technologies during your semester break? Here's a list:

Version Control
Firebase
GitHub Actions
Follow some YouTube channels

Version Control - If you are new to development

Not all universities teach version control and the students ended up using hacky weird solutions like OneDrive or emailing each other code. Just no, learn to use version control and learn to use it properly.

Why learn version control?

It saves you time, aid greatly in coordination, helps with your sanity and it is industry-standard skills you will need even tho your academic-centric university doesn't teach you how to use it throughout 4 years of Computer Science Bachelor degree education.

Which version control system to learn?

Git. It has a huge market share.

So what is Git? Git is a free program that helps you track your code changes and collaborate with other people. You can use hosting providers that help you store your code, its snapshots and coordinates with other people. It has a huge ecosystem of different hosting provides like BitBucket, GitLab, GitHub. Even if you are not comfortable with the Command Line Interface, you can still choose from its many GUI clients like SmartGit, GitKraken, SourceTree.

Where should you start with version control?

Quick Start - https://www.atlassian.com/git
Branching - https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
Branching suitable for school work - https://xingzhi.dev/blog/how-to-use-git-to-collaborate/

Take note of these

Avoid using the GitHub Desktop GUI Client, it's very constrained and lacks too many features
GitHub and Git are different things, GitHub is a service provider for Git

Firebase - If you want to create apps really quickly

Think of a JSON object in your application, when you write or read from it, it is always in sync with the cloud. That is the entire pitch for Firebase. Firebase is a Software as a Service Database.

Why learn firebase?

Firebase allows you to write fully fledged applications with data synchronized with the backend without actually writing any backend code. It's Application Programming Interface is rather simple and intuitive, and you can save so so much development time since you only need to write the Frontend application.

Where should you start learning Firebase?

Firebase has a rather robust quickstart guide that walks you through the basic and lightweight concepts, some code snippets and walks you through the process of creating a restaurant app.

GitHub Actions - If you want automation on your code

You might have heard of Continuous Integration (CI). Continuous Integration is the idea of running automated tasks that help you enforce code correctness, quality and standards among other automated tasks.

Why learn GitHub Actions?

There are many other Continous Integration solutions in the wild. You might have heard of Jenkins, TravisCI, GitLab DevOps. But GitHub Actions stands out because it is built right into GitHub, you can configure it easily and it is a very smooth entry point into learning more about CI, DevOps, automation toolchains, cool things like that.

Where should you start learning GitHub Actions?

Why do you want CI / CD - https://dzone.com/articles/the-complete-introduction-to-cicd-1
Quickstart on GitHub Actions - https://docs.github.com/en/actions/quickstart

Watch some YouTube Videos

These channels are (mostly) not very tutorial heavy, but they provide rather timely updates to new changes in major technologies or they provide insights to lifestyle and career opinions.