Issues

[lakruzz]

Issues - to the rescue!

If MarkDown is of the essence git GitHub - then certainly are issues too. GitHub issues was one of the first features that was added to GitHub - besides git og course - and it's been based on MarkDown ever since. MarkDown owe a great deal of its global success and spread to GitHub Issues.

"Working those issues" is such an elementary part of modern programming and by extent also the online implementation of the fabled Post-IT notes used in Scrum and Kanban boards throughout all of the software industry - that its fair to say that they incarnate everything that's agile.

I know people who would disagree and perhaps argue:

"They are too simple - they don't allow me to model nested structures or parent-child leations"

Probably referring to what they are used to in Atlassian's Jira.

Or:

"They are too simple - Trello is also simple - but not soooo simple - I like Trello better"

Probably referring to the Trello Boards - while really - issues are comparable to Trello Cards ...not Boards. The Trello board comparison would be to GitHub Projects - we'll cover them in a bit. In Trello boards and cards are inseparable and in GitHub the projects are optional.

Hmmm is that good or bad? 🤔 ...stay tuned!

Personally I tend to also have fallen in love with some of the features in Trello, which I also use quite a lot - but never for anything code related. If it deals with code I always do my project planning in GitHub. The closeness to the code which was demonstrated in the previous issue (which I assume your followed through) is simply priceless.

GitHub announced in January 2023 that they now have 100 million active users and 372 million repositories of which 28 millions are public. Beyond any doubt - by far - that larges source code host in the world.

The sheer size and spread of GitHub gives instructors an obligation to learners, to include this in the curriculum.

Software is Eating the World

I argue that even contemporary terms like agile and DevOps are already gulped and swallowed by software. I'm referring to Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) platforms such as GitHub.

I belive the new learners should learn the concepts of agile and DevOps but I also claim that if they utilize the full feature set on GitHub, then they already picked up both.

Learning issues, milestones and projects covers agile, and actions, codespaces, releases and packages covers DevOps ...roughly at least.

No need to teach Scrum, Agile manifesto, Jenkins CI - except for the sake of history lessons. Most young learners will never find use for it. We've moved on.

We should facilitate:

"Social Coding" over "Agile"
"Anything as Code" over "DevOps"
"Automation" over "Descriptions and specs"
"Continuous Delivery" over "Iterative and Incremental"

Well I'm sidetracking - we were talking about issues. But honestly - I'm giving the learnes a speech like the one above - about "Software Eating The World", so let me let me Segway back and show how this is relevant - to issues.

Me, I find issues so important, that I was determined that I wanted to present my assignments as issues in GitHub. It's a didactic tool!

But copying issues is not supported in GitHub's template repository implementation or in GitHub Classroom - which is based on the same concept. And even skipping GitHub Classroom and potentially utilizing forks instead didn't solve the problem - since they also do not support copying issues from the source repo.

So I hacked what I needed - A small shell script, utilizing the gh Command Line Interface (CLI) - to make what I needed available in a linux terminal. Linux, the necessity to become container-compliant. Containers being the corner stone of any automated flow. GitHub Actions included.