Get an account for GitHub

To set up an account on GitHub, follow these general steps:

  1. Go to the GitHub website at https://github.com/.
  2. Click on the “Sign up” button on the top right corner of the page.
  3. Enter your preferred username, email address, and password in the provided fields.
  4. Choose whether you want to receive updates and announcements via email.
  5. Complete the verification process by solving a puzzle and entering a verification code sent to your email.

You will be able to upgrade to a paid level of service, apply discounts, join organizations, etc. in the future, so don’t fret about any of that now. Except your username. You might want to give that some thought.

A few tips, which sadly tend to contradict each other:

  • Incorporate your actual name! People like to know who they’re dealing with. Also makes your username easier for people to guess or remember.
  • Reuse your username from other contexts, e.g., Twitter or Slack. But, of course, someone with no GitHub activity will probably be squatting on that.
  • Pick a username you will be comfortable revealing to your future boss.
  • Shorter is better than longer.
  • Be as unique as possible in as few characters as possible. In some settings GitHub auto-completes or suggests usernames.
  • Make it timeless. Don’t highlight your current university, employer, or place of residence, e.g. JennyFromTheBlock.
  • Avoid words laden with special meaning in programming.
  • Avoid the use of upper vs. lower case to separate words. We highly recommend all lowercase. GitHub treats usernames in a case insensitive way, but using all lowercase is kinder to people doing downstream regular expression work with usernames, in various languages. A better strategy for word separation is to use a hyphen -.

You can change your username later, but better to get this right the first time.

Once you have created your GitHub Account, please fill out the pre-course survey immediately. We will then invite you to join the GitHub Organisation for the course.