ARTICLE
I used GitHub a long time ago. The sole purpose of my repository was to host JSON file for Lottie animations. I didn’t think I’d use it again. Now, as I’m building my studio website in Webflow, I found myself going back to it. Adding custom code in Webflow is a decent experience. It doesn't have an IDE but everything was functional until I hit a 50,000 character limit. Apparently, it used to be much worse (10,000 characters).
There weren't many ways to get around it but one solution caught my eye: using JSDeliver with GitHub. Since I was familiar with GitHub, I decided to go back to it.
The GitHub mess
I already had an account and repository for Lottie animations but I wanted to start from scratch. So, I created a new account. I've also seen people editing the code in their IDE and simply pushing it to GitHub. I wanted that as well. Just had to link my GitHub account with VS Code. Sounds simple, right?
It wasn't simple at all.
I had already created the repo directly on GitHub, so when I tried linking it through VS Code, the terminal kept throwing errors. I tried deleting, relinking, even refreshing the credentials.. nothing worked! After far too long (and many Google searches later), I discovered that I simply needed to fetch and pull to sync everything (The devs reading this probably must be laughing and thinking 'Oh this guy is stupid'). This was a small win in my books, but it took me embarrassingly long to get there.
The jsDelivr surprise
Now that the "hard" part was done, I started reading about how to host my files using jsDelivr. Now here was a surprising part: Everything nowadays requires a sign up, so naturally the first thing that came to my mind was, 'So where do I sign up for jsDelivr?' Turns out, you don't! There's no sign up page, no setup wizard - just a properly structured URL. This was refreshing. jsDelivr works great and is super simple.
A project management tool in GitHub??
As I began spending more time on GitHub, I started discovering lots of new stuff (I guess they were there before but I never noticed it).
First, versioning: It is amazing to be honest. At first, I was like, 'This is great for actual products! If anything goes wrong in an update, just revert back! But how is it going to help me for my specific needs?' It took a while to fully understand how it works when I have multiple different code blocks, but after using it, it helps…it helps a lot.
Second, issues and projects: Now this is a game changer. It looks and functions like a mini project management tool. And I love how the issues and projects sync up perfectly with each other. I'm now using it to schedule updates to my code blocks. Having all these in one place has saved me so much time.
Honestly, I'm glad I took this approach. What started as a workaround for a Webflow limitation ended up teaching me more about tools I thought I’d never use again. And I'm having fun using it!