You'll get a lot of good tutorial information in class, so this page will just note a few helpful tips that tend to get lost in the shuffle.
Take a TON of notes of all the things you think you won't care about later:
Start working immediately on the habit of documenting work as you go - meaning write down all the little, seemingly insignificant obstacles, questions,
and other details that come up
in the process, good and bad - don't leave it to the end and a single sentence to describe the finished product. Look at past years' pages - which
sites are the most helpful to you- the ones that really get into detail, or the ones that skip over most of the work? It takes practice to keep
constant documentation going, but it's an extremely useful habit in general, not just in this class. It works as good focusing practice when you are
trying to juggle multiple things at once, helps you keep a better pace so you don't rush yourself into a frenzy, and gives you more to refer to later
when you inevitably need to check on something that came up previously.
When pushing, avoid creating new branches:
for the purposes of this class, creating a new branch makes more work than it saves, so please avoid that here.
Prepping images and videos before use
You'll want to use a lot of photos and videos to document your work, and on Gitlab it's imperative that you minimize all file sizes before uploading.
This can be obnoxious if you have a lot to use, but there are tools for batch editing. A
very easy way to reduce photo size size in batches (you MUST minimize file sizes
before uploading to Gitlab) is to use Imagemagick.