What is GitHub?

GitHub is a website where developers store their code and collaborate with each other. It’s built on top of git, the version control tool, and adds a web interface plus collaboration features that make it easier to work with other people.

When you use git on your computer, you have all your code history locally. But if your laptop dies, that history is gone. GitHub solves this by hosting your repositories in the cloud. You push your code to GitHub, and now it’s backed up and accessible from anywhere.

The real power of GitHub is the collaboration features. When you want to contribute to someone else’s project, you create a pull request. This lets you propose changes, have discussions about the code, and get feedback before the changes are merged. You can also open issues to report bugs or request features, review other people’s code, and manage project tasks. GitHub has over 100 million developers and hosts more than 330 million repositories.

GitHub also acts as a portfolio for developers. Companies look at your GitHub profile to see what you’ve built and how you code. Open source projects use GitHub to coordinate contributions from developers around the world. Popular projects like React, VS Code, and Ruby on Rails are all hosted on GitHub.

Before GitHub, developers used services like SourceForge and Google Code. GitHub came along in 2008 and made version control and collaboration so much easier that it quickly became the standard. Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion and have since added features like GitHub Actions for automation, Copilot for AI-assisted coding, and free private repositories. There are alternatives like GitLab and Bitbucket, but GitHub is by far the most popular.

I’ve been using GitHub since around 2010 and most companies I’ve worked at use it. I’m currently using GitLab at my current company for the first time. At first I was skeptical because I’ve always used GitHub, but GitLab is decent and has some features that we need.