GitHubAnimator

The Beginning

Inspired by my friend @SamirTalwar and the initiative he set upon himself to automate the world I picked up on an idea I had many months ago. Automating the generation of presentations using GitHub commits.

What Problem am I Trying to Solve?

Often I need to do a software related session and I have to present the code in small steps showing how I approached a problem. This usually involves a lot of copy and pasting code from a repository, one commit at a time, into PowerPoint or KeyNote or some other presentation application or framework. This is a very manual and error-prone process. Also, presentation applications usually know nothing about code, so I also need to hand format the copied code.

I have had the idea of automating this process but kept delaying it for some reason or another. After reading Samir's posts I finally decided to get it done.

Implementation

THE LANGUAGE

I've been learning F# and I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to do something useful with my new F# skills. Also this problem seemed well-suited to a functional approach.

INTERFACING WITH GITHUB

GitHub has published a library to simplify calling their API. It's called OctoKit and it's available for numerous languages and platforms. Since I was using .Net I applied OctoKit.net.

CREATING THE PRESENTATION

Initially I used Office automation frameworks by Microsoft to generate a PowerPoint presentation, but decided that going with a specific application could be too restrictive. So I started looking for a presentation framework with HTML5 and came across Reveal.js that proved a good match for what I wanted to build.

Hightlighting the Code Samples

After playing around with Reveal.js I found out that the code highlight features, out of the box, were a bit limited for what I wanted. So I searched for a framework that would work with Reveal.js. I found Prism.js did all I wanted and a bit more. I set out to integrate Prism.js with Reveal.js and finally had something that would meet my requirements.

Fiddling With CSS

The last part was to make some changes to Reveal.js and Prism.js CSS's to get the desired visual effect. This is an area I'm a bit out of my comfort zone so it took me a while to get something half decent.

The End Result

The code, as it stands now, is still very crude but it's capable of retrieving all commits for a file in a given repository and generating a presentation with Reveal.js. The presentation has a slide for each commit that changed the specified file. The slides use Prism.js to highlight the code.

There are still a few things hardcoded in the F# code, so it's not a "consumer" ready product, but some developers might be able to use it as is. You can find the code here.

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