When reviewing pull requests on GitHub, it’s often useful to have local access to the changes under review. There are a few different documented ways to accomplish this, but none have left me entirely satisfied. So, I came up with something different. Maybe it’ll work for you. The existing methods are: You can add a new git remote referencing the source of the PR, then fetch it and check out the branch containing the proposed changes.

I’m not much of an electronics guy. If I was exposed to it as a kid, I might have gotten into it, but there wasn’t much going on back in those days. Certainly not in central Maine, anyway. By the time I was really exposed to it in college, much of my curiosity and excitement for such things had been crushed, so I avoided the opportunity to learn when I could have.

Somewhere along the lines recently, I took an interest in JavaScript programming. I wrote some bad JS code way way back in 1999 while working for a small, long gone ISP, but had spent very little time in it since. When I last wrote JS, there was no XHR, JSON, FireBug, JQuery, prototype.js, etc. Netscape was pushing some new “layers” thing that was supposed to be the basis of their DHTML implementation, and Microsoft was doing something completely different.