Stage 2 of 8 · 9 lessons · ~4 weeks

Git and GitHub as your portfolio

Put every program you write on GitHub from the first semester. By final year your commits, READMEs and profile say more about you than your transcript does.

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: Have a GitHub profile with a profile README, at least five repositories with a README each, and one pull request you opened and merged from a feature branch.

Tauseef's advice

A recruiter looking at a student has almost nothing to go on, so steady commits and clear READMEs do real work for you. Learn about ten commands well: add, diff, status, commit, log, branch, stash, fetch, pull and push. Never upload copied assignment code, and never push passwords or API keys.