In this video.
I'll do my best to keep this quick.
I want to talk about why you should use GitHub or know how to use it.
And not just the basic reason of backing up your code or being able to collaborate.
Although obviously that's really important part of using GitHub and one of the main reasons people want
to use it.
But there are other reasons, especially if you're part of the, I guess greater developer community,
things like if you're looking for a job down the line or trying to meet potential mentors, there are
other reasons.
So collaboration is 100% one of the most important reasons to use GitHub.
If we take a look at some projects, I mean, you can see there are certain repositories that have 100
plus different contributors working on this same project.
So that's pretty amazing.
And there are repos with thousands and thousands of contributors.
But the first reason I want to focus on that, maybe a slightly different than just a generic collaboration
is good is open source projects.
If you're not familiar with the term or need a recap, open source projects are projects where the code
base is available, not just typically not just to look at, but also to make contributions to to fix
bugs, to discuss with a community, a greater community of people, usually the users of the product.
Anyway, GitHub has become the home of open source projects on the Internet today.
And so if you ever plan on working on open source projects or contributing or starting your own, GitHub
is a place to do it currently.
And if you have never made contributions, you might want to consider making open source contributions,
especially if you plan on looking for a job at some point.
It's great proof that you know what you're doing.
So just a couple of open source projects, things like react very, very, very popular tool, JavaScript,
library, it's all on GitHub and lots and lots of people have made contributions.
So it's not just the people on the official React team at Facebook.
Same thing with TensorFlow, just to give another example.
So machine learning framework 100, and that's how many people used it, almost 3000 contributors.
And that brings me to the next point, which is GitHub can give you as a developer, it can give you
exposure, it can give you I won't say notoriety, but if you do contribute to open source projects
consistently, you are going to run into people and sort of make friends or at least GitHub friends
because you're having conversations, you're you're talking about features and lines of code together.
Additionally, employers will often look at your GitHub profile, so I'll just show you one or two of
those.
This is my friend Kali who was recently looking for a job.
You can actually see her contributions here stopped when she got a job and started working on that job
full time.
But we've got things like her repository she's worked on.
If I'm thinking about hiring her, I might go take a look at one of them.
And what is this?
Oh, this is like a marketing website for a concert series, and then we can take a look.
Okay, so that's just a very simple demo of how, you know, your GitHub profile can act as a bit of
a resume for your code so we can take a look at all our different projects.
Similarly, here's another friend I can see recently just this In January, he contributed to material
UI, a very popular large front end component library.
And if I was thinking about hiring somebody and I saw that, you know, it's not an instant.
Yes, but it's a good sign.
And then the last reason that I'll list is that GitHub can help you stay up to date.
It has some sort of vaguely social networking features.
And if let's say you're a React developer, you can stay up to date on changes coming to the React project.
You can stay sort of active in the conversation and learn more about when that next massive update is
coming.
That is going to change everything.
You can even anticipate it.
If you're active on GitHub, you can set up notifications and you can be the first to know anyway.
For us, the main reason that it all comes back to is collaboration, getting our code up on GitHub.
But these side effects are nice to being able to work on open source projects is great in general,
but specifically, if you're looking for a job, it can be a great idea, a great sort of resume builder.
You can gain exposure, you can meet mentors and just sort of have a presence in the coding world and
you can stay up to date on repositories and upcoming changes.