GitHub: A social networking site for programmers

"What Gmail is to email, GitHub is to writing software."

This blog is about my experiences and my views on GitHub. It doesn't talk about the various features it offers and how things work on GitHub. Maybe I'll write a separate blog for that :)

I remember coming across this name, 'GitHub' in the beginning of first year of my engineering. I was attending a workshop conducted by some of my seniors which was mostly based on what GitHub is and how is it helpful for any programmer in today's world.

So what exactly is GitHub? There’s a follower-following count in GitHub but it’s not Instagram. A sidebar shows who is trending but it’s not Twitter. One can use emojis to display current status but it’s not WhatsApp. It has several elements of a popular social media platform, but it is not one. If I were to give the best, brief description of GitHub, I'd say that Github is a platform where programmers maintain their projects and meet other developers with similar interests and passion. It's a platform used by around 50 million software developers to host their coding projects, most of them open-source — meaning others can access their codes and modify them to create better versions if they feel like.

What YouTube is to content creators or Instagram is to influencers, GitHub is to developers around the world. It is here that they find validation and a means to express themselves in the language(s) they know best — Java, Python, C, Ruby,… you get the drift.

The platform allows developers to collaborate with fellow developers from around the world. For a community that stays isolated from the mainstream world and never gets its moment under the sun, GitHub is where developers find their place to discuss, enhance, learn and collaborate with people who essentially understand who they are and what they do. It hosts a community which was a long time coming and still has a long way to go!

One thing I like the most about GitHub is that there's no room for gender bias. It's a very wholesome community with like-minded people. It's not like any other social media platform where women are targeted and mocked for doing something people might not approve of. I personally know some amazing #WomenWhoCode before joining Github and it's amazing how it has helped me widen my network even further.

I've started looking at code differently ever since I've joined GitHub. I used to freak out on seeing any popular repositories and the code that resided within them. With time, it has only helped me to analyse the code in a better way and understand the gist of the project.

I could go on and on talking about how GitHub has changed my life as a developer. If you are a developer and haven't tried GitHub yet, go try it now!!!😄