What is GitHub, actually?

GitHub is a website that hosts code. More specifically, it hosts Git repositories: folders of code plus a full history of every change made to them, who made each change, and when.

Git itself is a version control tool, originally written by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to manage the Linux kernel’s source code. It runs on your own computer and works without any internet connection. GitHub is a separate company (bought by Microsoft in 2018) that took Git’s underlying model and built a website around it: a place to store repositories online, browse their history, and collaborate with other people on the same code.

The distinction that trips people up

Git and GitHub are not the same thing, even though the names are close enough to blur together.

Git is the tool that tracks changes to files. You could use Git for the rest of your life without ever touching GitHub, storing your repositories on your own server or nowhere at all. GitHub is one company’s product built on top of Git, and it is currently the most popular one, but GitLab and Bitbucket do the same basic job.

Think of it as the difference between a filing cabinet and a specific office building that rents out filing cabinets with a shared hallway between them.

What people actually do on it

A typical repository on GitHub contains source code, plus a few supporting files: a README explaining what the project is, a license, and often a folder of tests. From there, GitHub adds the collaborative layer that made it popular:

Issues let anyone report a bug or suggest a feature. Pull requests let someone propose a change to the code, which the repository’s maintainers can review, comment on, and merge. Actions run automated checks, like tests or deployments, every time new code is pushed. None of this is Git itself; it is GitHub’s layer on top.

Why employers care about it

For software engineers, a GitHub profile has become something close to a public work sample. Where a résumé claims you know Python, a repository shows the actual code, and a maintainer can judge it directly.

That is also its limit. A lot of real engineering work happens in private repositories that never show up on a public profile, so an empty-looking GitHub account does not mean an empty career. We wrote about this in more detail in how the contribution graph actually works, which covers exactly what does and does not get counted.

Getting started

Creating an account is free and takes a couple of minutes: a username, an email address, a password. From there, most beginners either clone an existing project to look at real code, or create a first repository and push a small project to it. GitHub’s own documentation covers both flows well, and there is no need to learn every feature before starting; most working developers use a small, repeated set of commands.

Turning a profile into something you can hand someone

Once a GitHub profile has some real activity on it, the account itself becomes useful outside of coding: a compact, verifiable record of what someone has built and how consistently they have worked. That is the entire premise behind resumefromgit.com: type in any public GitHub username and get back a visual CV, built from the repositories, languages, and contribution history that account already has, plus a resume PDF that goes through applicant tracking systems cleanly. No signup, and nothing to install.