Stage 2 of 7 · 9 lessons · ~4 weeks

Clean up your GitHub this month

Recruiters and interviewers will open your GitHub. Spend a couple of weeks making it tell a true story: your best work pinned, every repository explained, and real commits from now on.

Start: Commits and the staging area

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

Do this

Apply for the GitHub Student Developer Pack with your university email
Create a profile README: who you are, what you are learning and your best two projects
Push every program from this semester, each with a README that says what it does and how to run it
Write commit messages that say why, not "update" or "final final"
Work on a feature branch and merge through a pull request, even when you work alone
Make your first pull request to the First Contributions repository

Start with· follow one of these

GitHub repoFree
GitHub Skills: Introduction to GitHub
GitHub · Beginner
Free hands-on exercise: branch, commit, open and merge a pull request in about an hour
CourseFree
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
MIT · Beginner
MIT lectures on the tools degrees skip; the shell and version control lectures are enough here

Practise

Learn Git Branching
Draws the commit graph as you type, so branches and merges finally make sense
First Contributions
Your first real pull request, on a repository that exists to accept it

Keep handy

Managing Your Profile README (GitHub Docs)
Official steps for the profile README that sits at the top of your GitHub page
Oh Shit, Git!?!
Plain-English fixes for the day a commit, merge or push goes wrong

Also worth your time

Creating a Winning Coding Portfolio to Impress Interviewers (opens in a new tab)Read
How to choose, structure and present projects so a reviewer sees your best work first

Before moving on: Pin your three best repositories, each with a README covering the problem, stack, screenshots and how to run it, and add a profile README that links to them.

Tauseef's advice

Archive or make private the half-finished tutorial clones: five honest repositories beat forty empty ones. You cannot fake four years of history, so do not try; just commit real work every week from today.