GitHub is a web service that keeps track of code and files, designed to enable folks to collaborate on projects. Just about all of Adafruit's coding projects and hardware are hosted on GitHub. Since Adafruit publishes open source hardware and software, this works great to share the designs and also get feedback and improvements from the community. Community members can even find bugs or add new features, and submit those back to Adafruit so that everyone can benefit from the effort!

GitHub has a personal profile feature that allows you to create a profile that shows up if someone views your main GitHub page. You'll find an example here.

To create a profile, you create a repository with the same name as your GitHub user ID, and add a README.md file to that repository. You then add the info you'd like to include using Markdown, and GitHub renders it. That's all there is to it! Right? Not exactly. How do you make a repository with a README file in it? What is Markdown? How do you know what to include in your profile? How do you use Markdown to make all of this happen? This guide has you covered.

This guide will first discuss some ideas about what content you might want to include in your profile. Next, you'll learn how to create your repository and include a README.md file in it. You'll also learn about Markdown and how to edit the README file. You'll be introduced to some tools to assist with generating content that fits your needs and desires. Throughout the process, you'll follow along with a demonstration of creating and updating a GitHub profile.

By the time you're done here, you'll be able to point folks to a wonderful GitHub profile that is both memorable and representative of you!

Terminology

Here are some interchangeable terms used in this guide.

• repository and repo - The latter is short for the former; both refer to a repository.
• README and README.md - The README file this guide refers to is specifically a README.md file, however, both terms are used in multiple places.
• commit and save - GitHub refers to "saving" your content as "committing". Most of the time commit and committing are used, however you may see save as well.

Prerequisites

There is one step you need to complete previous to working through this guide.

1. If you do not already have a GitHub account, visit GitHub signup to create a new account.

That's it!

Acknowledgements

Thank you to GitHub user rzashakeri for putting together a massive list of tools to help Beautify your GitHub Profile. The tools demonstrated in this guide are all pulled from this list.