Continuing our crash course into Git and GitHub, we’ll now learn more about GitHub and how to establish your presence in this platform, where you can start sharing your code and contributing to open source projects.

GitHub is a leading platform for software development and version control, and has revolutionized the way developers collaborate and contribute to open source projects. As a centralized repository for code, GitHub facilitates seamless version tracking, allowing multiple developers to work on a single project simultaneously. Its intuitive interface, branching and merging features, and issue tracking capabilities make it an indispensable tool for developers of all skill levels. Moreover, GitHub fosters a vibrant community where developers can share ideas, learn from one another, and contribute to a vast array of open source projects.

In this guide for beginners, you’ll learn how to create a new GitHub account and how to customize your profile.

Creating a GitHub Account

If you don’t have yet an account on GitHub, now is the time to sign up. Click on the “sign up” button on the top right, and follow the instructions. You’ll need to provide a valid email address, and then choose a username and password.

After that, you’ll be asked to verify your account by solving a puzzle; this is to make it harder for spam accounts and bad actors to create accounts on the platform. Once you complete the puzzle and verify you’re not a “robot”, you’ll be asked to confirm your email address with a code that was sent to your inbox. After confirming, you should get a message informing you that your account was created successfully, and you can now log in to the platform.

After logging in, you’ll be asked a couple of questions so that GitHub can provide you with a more customized experience.

Then, you’ll be asked to choose between Free or Pro. If you are a student, you can also apply for the GitHub Student Pack, which will give you access to pro features for free. You can always start with the free account and upgrade later on.

After clicking on “Continue for free”, you will be redirected to your dashboard. From here you can create your first project or start exploring open source projects and repositories.

Customizing your Profile

The next step is to customize your profile information. To access the user menu, click on your avatar on the top right of the screen. In this menu, you’ll have quick access to all your account settings and resources.

To customize your profile, access the “Settings” item from the menu. In this page, you can customize your display name, bio, pronouns, and URLs / links. You can also change your avatar here.

To preview your profile after saving your changes, use the “Go to your profile” button on the top right, or go to the user menu and access “Your Profile”.

Creating a README to Further Customize your Profile

If you check your profile now, it will look pretty basic:

You can further customize your profile by creating a profile README, which is a markdown file that must be committed to a special repository with the same name as your username.

The easiest way to create this file is by going back to your dashboard at github.com and using the shortcut available in your Home section. Click on the “Create” button under “Introduce yourself with a profile README”:

You can now use the web editor to fill in your profile information in Markdown format. Use the “preview” button to preview your changes.

Looking for inspiration? Check the Awesome GitHub Profile Readme repository, which contains a curated list of GitHub profiles with nice README customizations that you can use as reference to build your own.

When you are satisfied with your README, click on the “Commit changes” button. A pop-up window will appear where you can customize your commit message.

When you click on “Commit changes”, the file will be committed to your special repository, and your profile will now render this content automatically. Hooray! You just learned a new way to make commits directly from the GitHub interface.

Notice that GitHub automatically created your special repository for you, and it will now be listed within your profile. Whenever you want to change your profile, go to this repository and edit the README.md file in it.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned how to create your GitHub account, how to customize your profile basic information, and how to create a custom section for it using a profile README.

In the next part of this series, you’ll learn how to pull this special repository into your local machine, so that you can work on your README offline, and then push these changes back to the remote repository.