Mike Zamansky has another video out on how he uses GitHub Classroom for teaching. Like the first, it’s not really about Emacs—although he does use Emacs in the process, of course—but it’s an interesting study on a tools-based approach to otherwise boring or rote tasks.
The use of GitHub Classroom makes things a bit easier but the same ideas would work with any setup that has a server with something like Git installed on it. Here, for example, is the method John Kitchin uses to accomplish pretty much the same thing. Still, as Zamansky says, GitHub Classroom abstracts away a lot of the administrative tasks and you don’t have to worry about setting up your own server.
If you’re a teacher, you should definitely take a look at the video but even if you’re not, it’s an interesting use case of leveraging everyday tools—shell, sed, make, echo, and so on—to get a job done as easily as possible. You may not be a teacher but if you’re reading Irreal you probably often have occasion to process a collection of related files and that’s what Zamansky’s video is really about.
As a final note, I’ve been using Sed for decades but didn’t know that s/** Name: // was legal. It turns out the special regex operators that don’t occur after other text are not treated specially. So I learned something new and that’s yet another reason to spend the 16 minutes 43 seconds on the video.