GitFichas #

Hello! If you just arrived here, I welcome you out of the bottom of my heart! Here you’ll find the notes and thoughts around my process for developing the GitFichas website.

This diary isn’t a diary #

A little disclaimer before we start: Even though this page is called “diary” it will not be updated daily. That is because this project is only worked on my free time, that is, during weekends and holidays.

It also worth mentioning that differently from the articles you usually find in my blog that aim to teach someone something most of the time, the goal of this page is to document the development process of GitFichas. Are you going to learn if you read this pages? Probably, yes, but the objective is to show what was done more than teaching, to expose the way I think. Show step-by-step the processes and thinking, even more the anything else document my own learnings.

I hope though that the info contained here will help you in any way. And that, by following along with this temporal sequence of steps you may know what to do if you ever start your project, and preferably de without making the mistakes I did.

How I do I work on GitFichas #

I have a limited time to work on GitFichas, and it is, literally, a side project I do on the weekends. So every new feature you see occur over a few days.

I try my best to separate the activities I need to make and the adjustments so that they can only need one day of work but bigger changes not always work like that. My goal is always to work on GitFichas on Saturday so I can rest on Sunday and be ready for the working week without feeling exhausted or overwhelmed.

A little bit of history #

How was GitFichas born #

I’m preparing some longer content about Git that I’m not ready to share yet, since it is longer it requires more time of me to prepare, review and publish it. Out of this need for more preparation time a “itch” started to appear.

This itch came from the feeling that “I’m creating this piece of content to help people, but it is not ready yet, and what I’ve got so far is just sitting in my computer without helping anybody”. So I tried to find a middle ground where I could publish some of the content that is ready and help people squash their doubts about Git.

So I started to think about how I could make this happen. Around the same time was trying to learn to draw and to do lettering on the iPad, side note: I have to many hobbies. I also follow Chris Albon and Julia Evans — do follow both of them, they are great references — and about the same time I was thinking about these things I saw one of the Machine Learning Flashcard and another Zine, and a lightbulb went on, maybe I could do something like that only about Git. And then the work began.

How each card is made? #

So yes each card is drawn manually. Yes, you read that right, drawn. Let me explain a little better.

For each card I follow the same set of steps:

1. Choosing a command: I chose which command I want to approach some times based on the questions I make or receive on Twitter, or even yet, I take note of some command I used during the week and that I thought was cool;
2. Content planning: Then I write the draft of the content that goes into the card on my notes app. These drafts contain everything that goes into a card: the title, the command, and the descriptions of each part of the command. I usually write it in Portuguese and then I adapt it into English;
3. Card creation: Only when I have all the information I want to put into a card I draw the card. I use Procreate as my drawing app, I draw the command then I write the notes describing each part of the command then the titles and I export the image in both languages.

Here’s what a timelapse of a card being made looks like:

With all of that done, we have a card in our hands. To finalize the whole process I create each card blog post and publish it.