GitHub Rules and Expectations
It is important to have documentation for people to reference as they learn how to work in a team. One document I use when I'm onboarding a student onto one of my codebases is my GitHub Rules and Expectations. The basic idea is to give them a clear idea of how to interact with everyone when it comes to the codebase and step-by-step instructions on what to do in certain situations. Below is the current version of my document. And yes, the "Rationale for Rules" is a section under the rules, so the students understand why I'm asking them to follow the rules. [Also posted on medium .] Rules The main branch is only for final work and has a clean commit history Do not directly commit to the main branch Work In Progress (WIP) branches Use these for all initial work Tiny commits on these branches are perfectly acceptable It is fine to use a WIP for a pull request (PR) if its commit history is clean. These can and should be pushed to the repo to have backups of work. Clear co