TL;DR: After 10 years on GitHub, I’ve learned the value of consistency. From my first commit as an intern to collaborating on open source, GitHub has shaped how I learn, share, and build. In this post, I reflect on key lessons from my journey, and why it still matters today.
🧠 A Decade on GitHub
I remember when I was in my first job as an intern in a software house called Absis (2015). I was with two more colleagues and we decided to create a GitHub account (to be honest here, I don’t exactly remember why), because in the software house we used Tortoise SVN (yeah, pretty old huh?). But the thing is, we created it and my journey with that awesome and powerful platform began (cheers to Kaleb and Gabriel). By the way, I do not find the Gabriel's GitHub anymore :/
As I mentioned before, I was an intern and I didn’t even know exactly the purpose of GitHub, but I knew that it was important since all my references used it and had it.
Things didn’t start smooth with GitHub. We created it, but actually the journey of learning how to use it had just begun. Then I started some free online courses, and things started to make sense.
Maybe for most of the readers, Git and GitHub are already mastered topics, and you use them in your daily work routine. But trust me guys, it can look pretty simple and useful for us right now, but for those who are starting, it is so complicated and can take a month or more to get used to it. It’s hard, but whenever possible, try to put in practice your empathy to look at things with a beginner’s perspective.
The following tip is very useful and I wish someone had shared it with me before. I discovered it by myself, but basically, before starting to use or study something, I like to go back to the origin and understand why it was created, what problem it solves. In the case of Git, it was pretty interesting, I strongly recommend you to go for that information and learn more about it =)
🕰️ Early Days
I don’t remember exactly my first repository, my first star or issue. Of course, I can check it, because we always have all the history stored in GitHub. Probably I learned that after pushing some changes that deleted something that was not meant to be deleted haha.
What really made a difference in my GitHub learning journey was consistency, even just to get familiar with the common commands. After the intern job in the software house, I had the opportunity to work as a front-end developer in a digital marketing agency, where I needed to use GitHub every day to deliver my work.
It was around 2017, two years after the creation of my GitHub account. At that time, things started to get serious with GitHub, and I understood that there is no better place for collaboration than inside GitHub or any other Git-based versioning platform/tool.
📚 What GitHub Helped Me Learn
It is so satisfying when you create pull requests to a recently discovered project and your collaboration is accepted by the owners of the project. Probably GitHub was the reason for my passion about open source and collaboration.
I really recommend you take a periodic look at the trending page in GitHub. There are always awesome projects that you can check out, that you can use, fork, make modifications and improvements to, or even discover new worlds of possibilities.
Who, with more than 1 year of coding, has never found an issue in the repository of a lib that you use, and you are facing some error that you have no clue how to solve — and another person already created an issue with the same problem. You feel so understood! Of course, sometimes there is no issue related to the problem you are facing, so be the one who will create the issue (following the issue template, please haha), and help future folks who will fight with it in the future.
Also, every year we have the hacktoberfest, a brilliant event that incentivizes open source collaboration. You will achieve points and get rewards if you collaborate with other repositories, if people collaborate with your repositories, and so on. It’s really cool for experienced developers, but even more so for those who are starting in that world.
I don’t have words to describe how “proud” I felt after receiving my first prize kit from Hacktoberfest back in 2019. Until today I have and use my t-shirt :D
🔮 What’s Next?
After 10 years on GitHub, I know one thing for sure: this journey is far from over.
The tech world is evolving faster than ever with AI, new frameworks, and new ways of collaborating. GitHub itself is changing, with tools like Copilot making coding even more accessible and collaborative.
For me, the next step is about keep consistent , keep contributing, keep learning, and keep helping others, especially beginners who are just getting started (like I once was).
And of course… the goal is to come back here in another 10 years and write a new post: 20 Years on GitHub 🚀.
Thank you for read until here 🙏 Let's connect! Feel free to follow me on github, I'll for sure, follow you back. Happy coding!