When you are starting out as a web developer, it can sometimes be overwhelming to witness all the various platforms and the tools and the different languages that you are exposed to. However, there are not many who feel that GitHub is perhaps one of the most essential platforms for web developers who are starting out.

GitHub was launched in early 2008 and it is essentially a platform which provides web developers with best practices which can prove to be a very important tool-set in equipping you to put your work out there and at the same time, know what the different tools are, available at your disposal.

In addition to this, GitHub is also a storage area for a developer’s projects, giving one space for storing their files and also has something called as version control, which allows you to not just store files but also track them on a real-time basis.

Advantages of GitHub

When you are working on your version control, there are few platforms which have the kind of abilities that GitHub does. It doesn’t matter where you are developing; whether it is in Ruby or JavaScript or Python, you require a good version control work-flow and GitHub makes that entire process much easier by providing you with a ready-made tool-set that equips you to do just that.

Interface

Git is perhaps one of the most important tools out there, but it can only be used on Terminal, which is more often than not, an extremely daunting place to start from, especially if you are a new developer. Viewing logs and differentials between commits can sometimes be a very difficult thing to do.

The best part of GitHub is that it is intuitive and perhaps one of the best providers of a powerful graphical interface for the Git versioning system. It has made the viewing of commits very easily manageable through the repositories that you can quickly set up.

Providing the path to collaboration

Since GitHub is primarily a collaboration platform, it provides a bunch of collaboration tools which makes it easy for developers to work together.

• GitHub enables you to create access rights to your codes, which means that you can select and choose certain users/developers who can easily push codes into your repository.
• GitHub has a very popular feature called the forking feature which basically allows a developer to create a copy of the repository on their main computer without affecting the original repository. You can also modify the code and then request to have the code merged with the original repository, using another one of their features called “Pull requests”.

Open with Open-source

With so many great tools at one’s disposal, GitHub has become the go-to place for open source projects. Some of the largest open-source projects are hosted on GitHub such as Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, Bootstrap and many other such examples. There are even some of the biggest like Microsoft which keeping some code repositories secure on GitHub.

The collaboration features that were mentioned earlier, make it one of the secure and popular choices for web developers with any amount of experience.

GitHub has also adopted social features on its platform by allowing developers to “watch” some of their favorite developers by following their project from scratch.

There are a huge number of things that are taking place in the world of software development and with so many different paths to explore, GitHub is only the tip of the iceberg. In the world of software development, no limit is left un-stretched and it can only get better from here.