It is not long since I started my computer science program so I didn’t get a chance to collaborating with other programmers and show up in a project.

This semester I started to do some experiments following one professor. I think doing experiment is a good starting point before digging into real research. Also this gives me a great opportunity to learn how to use Github to share.

The project has already had all require functionality implemented and what I am going to do is to modify using new heuristic and check the running time. If the running time decreases significantly, then I do the following experiment to check whether other costs.

This article helped a lot.

To start with, clone the existing repository:

git clone the/url/of/the/repository

Next, create a new branch for my own experimet because I am not going to interfere with others’ work or ruin the whold project. Here git checkout -b creates a new branch and switches to it.

git checkout -b my_branch_name

Then I can do whatever I want under this branch. Just remember to check the modified code and commit them in the end:

git status
git add modified/code/in/your/branch
git commit -m "What I have done to this branch"
git push origin my_branch_name

This will go under this branch without interfering with the master.

To keep updated with the repo:

git pull

Also, when I finished changing codes, I may send Professor a pull request. But so far, my codes are still in this branch.