Be Social

If you’ve found yourself on this page, we’re assuming you’re brand new to Git and GitHub. This guide will walk you through the basics and explain a little bit about how everything works along the way.

First: Follow A Friend

One of the great features on GitHub is the ability to see what other people are working on and who they are connecting with. When you follow someone, you will get notifications on your dashboard about their GitHub activity.

1. Pick a friend.

   Why not follow one of these cool people?

   

   Tom Preston-Werner

   mojombo

   

   Chris Wanstrath

   defunkt

   

   PJ Hyett

   pjhyett

   

   Scott Chacon

   schacon

   Who are these fine fellows? We’re the founders of GitHub, of course!

2. Follow a friend

   Once you are on one of their pages, click the “follow” button.

   

   Congratulations! You are now following a friend.

Next: Watch A Project

At some point you may want to stay up-to-date with a specific project. We’ve made this easy to do.

1. Watch a project

   Our friend the Octocat has a project called Hello World that we’d like to watch.

   Once you are in the project page, you will notice there is a “watch” button at the top of the page. Click on it.

   

   Congratulations! You are now watching the the Hello World project. If the Octocat updates it, you will see what happened in your dashboard.

Then: More Things You Can Do

You’ve done some of the most basic social interaction GitHub has to offer, but don’t stop there! Check out these other social features:

• Pull Requests

  You may find yourself wanting to contribute to someone else’s project, whether to add features or to fix bugs. After making changes, you can let the original author know about them by sending a pull request.

• Issues

  When you are collaborating on a project with someone, you some times come across problems that need to be fixed. To help you keep track of these problems, each GitHub repo has a section called Issues. For an example, check out the issues for the Spoon-Knife repo.

• Organizations

  Have you found yourself wishing you could collaborate with multiple developers on one project? You can manage everyone with Organizations! With an organization you can establish teams with special permissions, have a public organization profile, and keep track of activity within the organization.

Lastly: Celebrate

Congratulations! You are quite the socialite. What do you want to do next?

1. Set Up Git
2. Create A Repository
3. Fork A Repository
4. Be Social