So we are leaving the world of Git now,
at least partially, and introduce GitHub.
This brings us back to the slide
from the beginning of this module.
You hopefully remember it.
And with the knowledge gained in the last lectures,
this left, this Git part, hopefully is a lot clearer now.
You now know more about how Git works
and also what repositories are.
Now onboard to GitHub here means leaving this local world
and bringing our locally managed repositories
to the cloud to GitHub.
Now, this has lots of advantages
and also four core use cases actually.
So before we have a closer look at GitHub,
let's first explore
why using GitHub is actually a very good idea.
First, we can use GitHub as single developers,
as single users.
Well, the type of user we are throughout this course so far.
This has one great advantage.
It helps us to store our code, to store our projects,
not only locally on our machine, but also in the cloud.
Now this has, for example,
the advantage that if we kind of want to access our code
from another computer, we can do that.
And also, of course, it has the advantage for the case
that our computer breaks somehow or our hard drive breaks,
anything like that, so in case our local data is lost,
we have this data in the cloud too.
Besides this storage advantage,
we also can use GitHub to present ourself as developers
to create our own portfolio page.
We'll learn in the next lectures
that GitHub comes with a personal user account
and that each GitHub user has a personal page so to say.
On this page, you can present projects
you are currently working on or projects you've worked on.
And with that, this is a very great tool
to show other developers or other potential employers
what you can do and what a great developer you actually are.
These are all single user use cases though,
but GitHub is also great for team projects so to say
for projects where you are not the only person
working on it.
In this team context,
the concept of collaboration is a very important one.
Collaborating on development
or web development project is very common these days.
Web development projects and web pages
tend to become quite huge in the last years.
And therefore, it's typical that not only
a single web developer is working on such a page,
but multiple developers are collaborating
and working on individual parts of this website.
This means that all people inside this team
need to have access to the entire code
and also to their individual codes they are working on.
And this code also has to be efficiently managed
to avoid any kind of chaos
to keep the code easily maintainable.
So collaboration and making the code accessible
for all people which are part of our team
is one big use case for GitHub.
The fourth core use case
and the last one I want to cover here
is the contribution use case.
Besides having official team members,
GitHub is also often used
for so-called open-source projects.
This means teams or developers
make their code available for basically anybody
and this allows you or other developers
to contribute to this project by, for example,
fixing bugs or by adding new features.
Now this, of course,
has to be a very well-organized approach.
Otherwise again, if anybody could randomly update the code,
the open-source code,
I don't think this will be a good idea.
Therefore, the contribution part
is also something GitHub offers
and it also offers the tool to make this possible
in an efficient and easily to maintain way.
So this is our way onwards to GitHub
and this is also why using GitHub is a good next step
when the Git basics are set.
Therefore, let's now dive into GitHub and let's explore it.