GITzilla - The hands-on session on Version Control Systems using git.

The most awaited event for the semester just came by and believe me it was a lot more fun than we thought it would be.




It all started off in one of the regular weekly meetings with the club members when one of our guys, Subhrajyoti came up with this need of teaching people git as many of us were programmers, but weren't able to contribute to MDN because of lack of knowledge in VCS. Of course, we are undergrad students ;)



After a discussion with the local community, Kaustav Das Modak, Mozilla Rep, seemed available to host the event at my campus. Alrighty, we all split ourselves into various categories from marketing to registration to managing permissions to arranging the venue along with the things required. It was a crazily insane journey. We were then a 15 member club and to add to our excitement, our college's management agreed to sponsor us with club t shirts which we could wear for the event. Wow ! Some cool stuff we designed and wore "FSA" on our sleeves, always proud to be one !




The event kicked off on the fine Saturday morning. We had set up booths in alphabetical order for a smooth registration process. It was a verification of their online registrations. All strategically done which definitely involved a lot of pre planning. Tens of ether pads and permission letters were just something which lead to the success of this event.



Kaustav arrived early and we had another guest, Jaipradeesh Janarthanan. While they sipped a hot cup of coffee along with a light breakfast, our team was just getting the final touches done. We invited the HODs who helped us set the event up. They along with the guests inaugurated the event and wished us success.

After I gave a brief introduction about Kaustav and Jai and their awesome contributions to Mozilla, they both took to the stage and kick started the event. It was a huge crowd, ready to grab all the learning material that came their way !



They started off with a few installations and inconsistencies with those who hadn't pre installed the softwares and soon the basics of git via the command line were taught. A little friction was observed, dealing with the ton of different operating systems that the participants were using, although, it was definitely not an obstruction.

With regular breaks for caffeine, everyone was tightly hooked onto their laptop screens, hacking their way out with the tactics of using git.

Oh in the middle of the event, it was some quiz up ! Swags, who doesnt love 'em ;) All happy faces with pretty firefox stickers on their laptops and a select few who got "I love Mozilla" wrist bands :D



By lunch, the fist two modules of the session were done and everything went on well just as planned. However, post lunch, we saw a some problem with internet and router setup. Although, my people at the club Amith, Akhil and Treena sweated their time out fixing the issue, it unfortunately did not work out. Then just at the right moment, the awesome truth breaks that Kaustav and Jai, infact had an alternative offline teaching kit, just in case of such internet failures.



It continued smoother than ever and soon it all came to an end. All the student were honestly more than satisfied with what they had learnt and they told us they would love to have more such interactive sessions by the club. We were happy too :D



After a brief appreciation talk by the HODs, we all dispersed but only after the customary group picture ;)



A special part of "Thank you" goes to Vivek Tripathi from my club, who went all out of the line to get things in place ! 

The event can be tracked on social media using the hashtags #gitzilla and #takebacktheweb

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