GitHub for Beginners

This is the third in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

The second session I attended at the conference was called “How to Start an Open Source Project” and it dealt with the nuts and bolts of GitHub and open source licensing and all those other intimidating things that keep people from starting and contributing to projects. The presenter, Don Schenck from Rackspace, gave a great overview of the process, from getting an idea, naming it, creating the repository (repo) and starting with the first file.

One of the key things he said to us was “once you publish your code to GitHub, it’s not your code anymore,” which is a way of saying that open source projects belong to the community. When starting a project, you need to be starting it with that in mind. If you want to control every aspect of it, then open source may not be right for that project.

He also talked about the need for a development plan: what needs to be done, in what order, and how to get people to contribute.

I’m still not sure I’m ready to create my own project on GitHub, but I’m at least a little more confident that I might contribute to one.