DSMA Git workshop

On December 7th, a long-waited first educational event of Data Science and Marketing Analytics Master programme has been realised. The DSMA committee (MAEUR and EFR) collaborated with four data science specialists at Deloitte Consulting on a workshop regarding everything Git. The four-hour event was held in G-Building with an active participating class of coding-savvy students, where collaboration was thriving, and new questions were asked.

What did we learn?

Jorik Schra kicked off the workshop with an introduction of himself and his three colleagues (Olga Konstantinova, David Gardenier, and Pascal Lagerweij) and an explanation of why you should Git and GitHub. He highlighted the importance of version control and the benefits of code sharing. He continued with the basic terminology of Git and we moved on with the first practice assignment. Immediately hands went up in the air, the software was definitely not as easy as we thought it would be. The 4 instructors easily managed all the questions and soon enough everyone completed the first exercise of staging and committing a code file with your name in it. At that point Olga took over from Jorik and dove further into repositories. She discussed the difference between pushing and pulling a file which laid the foundation for the second exercise. Here we had to push a code file from our local repository on our laptops to a remote repository on GitHub. Now that everyone’s file was visible on GitHub, David started to explain the structure of branches and what types of branch strategies are common. We had to put this into practice as well by creating our personal branch from the main branch. We could then easily commit and push a code file with only your own name on the first line again, but we also had to merge our branch back into the main branch. At that moment, everyone became a little fidgety: we ran into a merge conflict. As everyone wanted to push a code file which altered the exact same line of code, GitHub does not understand which line it should keep, and which lines are incorrect. However, this was exactly what was intended by Deloitte and was the perfect start of the next topic, namely merge conflicts and pull requests. Pascal calmed our worries by explaining the concept of pull requests, where you pull the code file to GitHub and solve the merge conflict manually there. With this information we were able to solve our merge conflict in the last exercise. This resulted in a very successful end of the workshop, where all participating DSMA students can commit, push, pull, branch, merge, and more.

Throughout the Git masterclass, many questions were asked from the audience, creating an open and safe atmosphere for everyone present. Questions about code branching, merging, and Git strategies were most prevalent and interesting among students. 
The Erasmus University also has a corner for data-driven students at the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics (ECDA) in Polak building, our campus’ hub for data, AI and digitalization excellence with hands-on opportunities.

More information

For more information about this topic, first, see the VSCode Documentary. This is a universal and primary tool to begin any intelligent code completion. Also, for more information on Git, you may refer to the official manual with an in-depth description of the software’s possibilities and coding options.
Soon, the DSMA committee is organizing an alumni speed-dating evening, where you will be able to hear and learn the very best from the recent alumni of the programme, from experiences during the Master to their career achievements.
If you are interested in receiving an electronic newsletter about upcoming events organized by the DSMA committee, or any other helpful information for your programme, please fill out this form.

We hope to see you once again on one of our events!