Project Overview

It's time to put what you've learned about version control and GitHub into practice! In this project, you'll be simulating a realistic workflow to refactor your previous BikeShare project using Git. Here's an overview of your tasks for this project.

Set Up Your Repository

First, you'll fork a repository to get your own copy of a template for this project, and then clone it to your local computer. Your first task will then be to add your bikeshare.py file, data file, and a .gitignore file to exclude your data file from version control tracking. This is a common practice to avoid sharing your data publicly, to avoid tracking unnecessarily huge files on GitHub, and because changes in data don't often affect our code.

Improve Documentation

Next, you'll practice creating branches using Git to make some changes to your project. In the real world, it's common to use different branches to manage the development of separate features or changes to a project. The first branch you'll work on is documentation. In this branch, you'll add project documentation in a README file, and make improvements to your docstrings for your bikeshare.py file. Then you'll push your commits back up to the remote repository.

Refactor Code

The next branch you'll be working on will be refactoring. Here, you can modify your bikeshare.py file to make improvements to the efficiency or readability of your code. You'll practice committing your code as you work on it, with at least three commits on this branch with meaningful messages. Notice that this branch touches the code in your bikeshare.py file, while the documentation branch touches the docstrings in your file. This means you can work on these branches simultaneously without any conflicts! This is a common practice in the real world.

Merge Branches

Finally, once you are finished with your work, you can merge both branches to the master branch, and push it back up to the remote repository.

Submission

To complete this project, you will provide all the Git commands you used throughout this course in this template along with a link to your repository on GitHub.

For students in the Programming for Data Science with R ND:

You can use the R-module file instead of the bikeshare.py file