Lesson 6: Your Real Dev Workflow

No new commands this time — this lesson strings together everything from this course, in the order you'd actually use it, starting a real project from an empty folder to a working, backed-up, version-controlled app.

The full workflow, start to finish

Create and enter the project folder

mkdir my-app && cd my-app (Lesson 1)

Initialize npm and Git

npm init -y then git init (Lessons 5 and 2)

Add a .gitignore before installing anything

Create it now with node_modules/ inside, before you forget (Lesson 5)

Open it in VS Code

code . — and toggle the integrated terminal with Ctrl/Cmd+\` (Lessons 1 and 4)

Build something, then commit

git add . then git commit -m "Initial setup" (Lesson 2)

Connect to GitHub and push

git remote add origin ... then git push -u origin main (Lesson 3)

$ mkdir my-app && cd my-app
$ npm init -y
$ git init
$ echo "node_modules/" > .gitignore
$ code .

# ... build your project, then: ...

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial setup"
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/you/my-app.git
$ git push -u origin main

The daily loop, once a project exists

$ git pull                          # get any new changes first
# ... make your edits in VS Code ...
$ git status                        # see what changed
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Describe the change"
$ git push

This five-line loop — pull, edit, status, commit, push — is genuinely most of what a working developer does, day after day, on top of whatever they're actually building.

Recognizing this pattern

This is exactly the workflow used to build and publish the entire devnotes site you've been reading — every lesson, every article, committed and pushed the same way, through GitHub Pages. Nothing about it was more complicated than what you just practiced.

Try it yourself

the project

Start a brand new project from a completely empty folder, following every step above in order, start to finish. Push it to a new GitHub repository. This is the single most valuable exercise in the whole Developer Tools course — do it once, deliberately, and the whole sequence becomes second nature.