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Friday, January 8, 2021

Starting with GitHub and what it is for

 Today we are going to create ourselves a new account on GitHub using the email address we created earlier.  Git is a source control/version control tool that allows us to keep our files secure and also track changes in them over time.  GitHub has a free tier that is perfect for us.  You might be wondering why we would need such a thing?  Well, for one thing it allows us to store our working files in the cloud which means that we can access them and modify them from anywhere.  We will also be setting up some automation to have files automatically deploy for us very soon, so we are really just setting the stage for later development.  If we ever have the need to work with others on the same content, this gives us a way to do so without having to do as much coordination.  Marat has a good article Importance of Version Control and Why You Need It which goes into more detail, but just believe that you will need it.  Trust me.

Signing up is easy to do.  Just browse to https://github.com/ and click on <sign up>

Type in your username, email address, and password
Scroll down a bit and solve the verification puzzle and click <create account>
On the next page you can answer the survey or not, but you will need to scroll down to the bottom and click <complete setup>
The next page just lets you know that they have sent you a verification email with a link you will need to click on before you can store anything in the repository.  Once you receive the email and click on the link you are done!
Your verification screen will look something like this
Tomorrow we will create a repository and put some files in it.  Exciting?  Not really, but this is a marathon, not a sprint.  See you later!