Exercises — Stage 8: Push to GitHub

Exercise 1: Browse your commits on GitHub

Goal: Get comfortable reading history in the GitHub UI.

Steps:

1. Go to your repo page on GitHub.
2. Click the commits link (usually shows "4 commits" near the top).
3. Click any commit to see the diff for that save point.

What happened: GitHub's commit view is the web version of git show <hash>. Every commit message you typed in Stages 1–5 is visible here, in order.

Exercise 2: View a specific file at a specific commit

Goal: Learn to jump through history on GitHub.

Steps:

1. On the commits page, click the commit titled "Added scoreboard to the game screen."
2. Click the style.css link in that commit.
3. Notice you are seeing style.css as it looked at that commit — before the dark theme.

What happened: GitHub lets you browse any file at any point in history. This is the online version of git show <hash>:style.css.

Exercise 3: Run git push with no arguments

Goal: Confirm that -u set up tracking.

Steps:

1. Run git push.

What happened: You see "Everything up-to-date." Because -u linked main to origin/main, Git now knows exactly where to push with no arguments.

Exercise 4: Look at the remote tracking branch

Goal: Understand origin/main.

Steps:

1. Run git branch -r.
2. Run git log --oneline origin/main.

What happened: git branch -r lists remote-tracking branches — your local copy of what the remote looks like. origin/main is your cached snapshot of the main branch on GitHub. It updates when you push or fetch.