My Journey

In my journey, I had many ups and downs. There were steps that were easy and hard.

Easy Steps:

• Installing WSL

  • I opened a Powershell window as an administrator and typed: wsl --install -d Ubuntu-24.04
  • When the prompt showed up, I entered my username and password.
  • Then, after changing my prompt to WSL, I typed wsl --set-default Ubuntu-24.04 to set Ubuntu 24.04 as the default WSL distribution.

• Installing VS Code

  • I already has VSCode installed on my computer, which was easy to install. I installed VSCode from the VSCode website, and installed “Remote Development extension pack” as an extension.

• Git Identification

  • I ran these two commands to set my email address and username:
  • git config --global user.email youremail@gmail.com
  • git config --global user.name yourGHID
  • Finally, I verified my configurations by running: git config --global --list

• Opening a Project and “Make”

  • After creating my git username and email, I entered my student directory, and activated the virtual environment by running: source venv/bin/activate
  • Then, I opened VSCode by running: code .
  • After openeing VSCode, I could view all my files and edit all the markdown files to edit my website.
  • I opened a VSCode terminal and ran: make to create a local server. I ran this command every time I made changes and wanted to view them on my website.

Difficult Steps:

• Installing Developer Tools

  • In order to install my developer tools, I had to run all these commands (Note: I did this before some of the steps above):
  • cd
  • mkdir nighthawk
  • cd nighthawk
  • git clone https://github.com/nighthawkcoders/portfolio_2025.git
  • Then, I ran these commands in WSL to install the tools.
  • cd
  • cd nighthawk/portfolio_2025/scripts
  • ./activate_ubuntu.sh
  • This step was difficult because I had to delete and re-download everything in order for it to work properly. Also, the installation process took around 5-10 minutes to finish.

• Starting a Project

  • In order to start my project, I had to run these commands in order to setup a directory for my project and prepare the project

    • cd
    • mkdir -p nighthawk
    • cd nighthawk
    • git clone https://github.com/nighthawkcoders/student_2025.git
    • cd student_2025
    • scripts/venv.sh
    • source venv/bin/activate
    • pip install -r requirements.txt
    • jupyter kernelspec list
    • bundle install
    • code .
  • Then, I had to authenticate with GitHub.
  • This step was difficult because it took many attempts to install bundle and the pip install -r requirements.txt command didn’t work for me the first time.

In the end, I was able to install all the tools and get the GitHub working and synced to my website and VSCode!