My Student Initiative and SSH
Published: 2021-08-14 05:55:27

In this post:
 1. [My Student Initiative](#my-student-initiative)
 2. [SSH Struggles](#ssh-struggles)

##My Student Initiative
The genesis of my blog project was experiencing and seeing the struggle that we have sharing technical information within our cohort. Obviously the blog supports that in one fashion - hosting and persisting technical write-ups and materials in a central online repository.

But then there's the live interaction element. I signed up for HR in large (maybe majority) part so that I could collaborate with peers and discuss, learn from, and share with them.

I've seen that happen in spontaneous instances during this immersive. As we move into the 'Senior' phase and welcome 'Juniors' into the program, I've thought about how those inter-cohort interactions can occur. Primarily with information flowing in the Sr->Jr direction. We have student presentations, but they're far from interactive, and often hard to connect to as a junior. Maybe the presentation topic isn't something you've seen yet, or won't be introduced for another few weeks.

So I spoke with several of my classmates about introducing a new resource for the Juniors - a peer resource. If there's a Senior who has a strong understanding of a subject, and they enjoy sharing that knowledge, the Juniors should know. And any information sharing that comes from that would have an educational benefit (to both parties) but also deepen the bonds between cohorts.

So I approached a few students and then a classmate and I scheduled a few meetings with our cohort lead (staff) who gave us some constructive feedback, some points of concern for us to address, and then ultimately approval to go ahead with the initiative. I'm grateful for the thoughtfulness and openness that we were shown as they considered this project.

Our next steps are to formally introduce the idea to the Senior class and to gather volunteers. A form will collect the topics they're interested in helping juniors with (and hopefully seniors too), and then the following day, all of that will be presented to the Juniors and the project will be live. I'm not sure where it'll go and if there will be lively usage, but I'm excited to find out. 

##SSH Struggles
Today was a long long day, especially the last few hours of the day when I was wresting with SSH. Github changed some authentication requirements, and so I needed to set-up SSH keys to grant access from my terminal into my Github account.

It was about time I took a closer look at SSH since I've been dodging using it as a way to access my EC2 instance.

Anyway, I struggled, but think I finally got past my sticking point. I wish I had more clarity on exactly what was holding me up, but it's still fairly opaque to me.

The principle is sound. Generate a key and store it in a predictable folder `~/.ssh/`. Add the public key pair to github (or another service) that matches the public to the private and in doing so, verify your permissions.

I had a million tabs open and tried following github's own instructions. Ultimately removing (the http) origin and then re-establishing it with SSH worked for me.

[Here was the source for that solution](
https://stackoverflow.com/a/25623759)