Markdown and GitHub made easy with GitHub Desktop and VS Code

Are you intimidated by using GitHub? Need to update markdown files in your team's repo and procrastinating? GitHub Desktop can help!

GitHub Desktop simplifies git and GitHub and combined with VS Code can make you work life a little bit easier.

• Markdown and GitHub made easy with GitHub Desktop and VS Code
  • ℹ️ About this workshop
  • 💻 Prerequisites
  • 📚 Overview
    • What is GitHub?
    • 🖊️ What is Markdown?
    • ❤️ GitHub + Markdown
  • ➡️ NEXT: Set Up

ℹ️ About this workshop

This workshop was created by @rmw for GitHub's internal Day of Learning. It was created in response to hearing how non-engineers sometimes struggled with using GitHub.

💻 Prerequisites

The workshop assumes the following:

• you have a GitHub account. If not, you can sign up here.
• you are using a Mac.
  • This workshop should work with Windows just fine, but it has not been thoroughly tested.

📚 Overview

What is GitHub?

GitHub is the productive, collaborative, secure platform that developers love.

GitHub revolutionaized software engineering. It made finding, contributing and securing open source software much much easier. GitHub gave engineering teams tools to get feedback, leading to higher quality and more secure code. It made automation easier, requiring less resources to focus on things like CI/CD, creating releases and packages, and more. Today, GitHub is automating security and bringing the power of AI to development.

And it can be intimidating for non-software engineers.

It takes a village to build, maintain, secure, deliver, market, and sell software. This workshop aims to help demystify a common workflow for everyone else.

🖊️ What is Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language.

Language: text that a computer, with the right tools, knows how to turn into something else. In this case, it turns plain text into pretty text.

Markup: adding special characters (e.g. # or *) to text so that the computer knows how you want to display it. HTML is a also a markup language.

Lightweight: not trying to do it all.

Why is it useful?

• Not tied to a specific tool, such as Microsoft Word
• Simple to use
• Easy to read even with the special characters
• GitHub has its own flavor: GitHub Flavored Markdown or GFM

❤️ GitHub + Markdown

You can use Markdown in the following places on GitHub:

• Issues
• Pull Requests
• Store markdown (.md) files in your repositories. (Quickstart for writing on GitHub)
• Discussions
• Comments

➡️ NEXT: Set Up

Let's get our computer ready to start contributing to open source.