What is GitHub? The Open-Source Code Sharing & Publishing Service Explained

Falling down rabbit holes is a big part of using the internet these days, and most of those holes end up with people on GitHub, and no idea what the site even is. Anyone who has ever taken a look at mods for video games or custom software for phones has probably landed on this popular but rarely discussed platform.

To begin, an understanding of version controls is necessary. As anyone with an online connected device can attest, most electronics undergo downloadable updates. These updates install new versions of existing programs. This aspect of software engineering is called version control, and it involves the developers knowing which parts of the existing code to modify. However, blindly making changes without keeping track of those alterations is incredibly risky, so programmers rely on version control repositories to keep a history of all the different versions throughout the history of a program. Git was one of the more popular version control tools out there, and it focused on giving multiple developers ways to collaborate when updating code.

In the past, making those sorts of updates meant downloading the entire repository, performing the desired edits, and then reuploading the new version. GitHub streamlines that process by keeping the entire version history of a program in one location online. Users can collaborate without having to store local copies of a program, and they also get control over who has which kinds of authority and access. This type of online collaboration is strengthened by the platform’s “pull request” feature. Anyone on a project who has an idea for a change can start working on their modifications and alert the project’s owner(s). From there, those changes can be built collaboratively until everyone involved is ready to merge them into the original system. In short, GitHub is a website that allows people to code things as a team.

The most common interaction most people, especially those who are not coders, have with GitHub is through its open-source options. Depending on what kind of project it is, code is often shared freely on GitHub for people to download and install it to modify something they already own. Mods for video games are a great example of open-source code available to just about anyone on GitHub. Keeping in line with the platform’s initial purpose of allowing people to collaboratively code online, even open-source GitHub projects have an authority hierarchy and can be worked on by multiple people. That’s why people who come up with their own patches for software tend to publicly link to their GitHub repositories… just in time for our rabbit holes to lead us to them.

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