teaching-phd-skills

Why this exists

Do this one before anything else in M2. Git history is permanent. A credential committed once is compromised even if the next commit removes it, even if you force-push, even if the repo was private at the time — and the fix is rotating the credential, not amending the commit. This lab keeps Gurobi WLS credentials and ERCOT data under use agreements in the same directories as code. It is the only mistake on this list of twenty-four that cannot be undone afterwards, which is why the ordering below is not a suggestion.

External material

MIT Missing Semester, lectures 1 (shell) and 6 (version control). It teaches the fluency the standard presumes — what a commit actually is, why history is a graph. It is a prerequisite, not a duplicate: it rules on nothing about how your repo must be laid out.

Governing part

GETTING-STARTED.md in the standard gives the four-step ordering. Part 1 governs the repo itself. Read them directly — the ordering is the entire point and a paraphrase of it here would be exactly the failure Part 0 describes.

The mechanic

On your actual dissertation code, in this order and no other:

1. Write .gitignore.
2. Verify it with git check-ignore -v <path> for every data file and credential file — one invocation per path. The -v flag prints which rule matched. No output means no rule matched, which means the file is not ignored.
3. Run git status and read every line. Anything listed is about to become public forever.
4. Only now, the first commit.

Then work normally for at least five commits, with messages that say why, not what. git diff already says what.

Deliverable

Repo URL plus the pasted git check-ignore -v output.

Competency check

• Repo URL resolves
• git check-ignore -v output pasted, showing a matched rule for every data and credential path
• Searching the full history for your own credential variable names returns nothing
• At least five commits whose messages state a reason
• git status on a clean checkout is empty

Turning it in

This replaces your arithmetic entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WA assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.

• In the text box: what you nearly committed and did not.
• You hand in: A repo URL plus pasted git check-ignore -v output — one line per data file and credential path, each showing the rule that matched

You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all four skills in M2 are done, submit the M2 — Reproducible Code assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.

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