About the Foundation for Public Code

GitHub for newcomers

This guide

Contents

  1. Do it yourself, guided
  2. Further learning

GitHub is an incredibly powerful tool for collaboration at scale. However it is a power tool and requires some serious learning and understanding. For this reason, in order to learn effectively and not be frustrated often it pays to really dive deep into what it is and how it works.

If you know how to rebase a branch, you may not find very much new in this guide. Otherwise, we hope the contents linked below will provide you with the knowledge you need to operate git and GitHub.

GitHub has a 3 minute video to explain the basics.

Do it yourself, guided

The GitHub skills courses are great courses, so it pays to read them completely as well as watch all the videos.

For our way of working and how we use GitHub following this order makes sense:

  1. Introduction to GitHub
  2. Communicating using MarkDown
  3. GitHub pages
  4. Reviewing pull requests
  5. Resolve merge conflicts

Tip: If you get stuck because you think the bot should respond but it doesn’t it often helps to refresh the page.

With this knowledge you should now be good to go with your GitHub use!

Further learning

If you want to manage your (email) notifications:

If you want someone to show you: