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This is a friendly how-to for contributors to the Social Coding with GitHub course at OpenTechSchool. First, a quick refresher on the course:

You've written some code, but you might be wondering: where do I go from here? Enter the world of social coding with Git and GitHub. In this course we introduce you to GitHub, a free online service where over 2 million developers from around the world share their code. We'll show you how to share your code, meet like-minded programmers and participate in other projects. You can even host simple websites using GitHub. Whether you just want to share a little script, or contribute to some of the largest and most dynamic software projects in the world, well show you how to get started!

So we are expecting users who have written a little code before but never shared it. They may have some JS, Python or Ruby skills, and may have written a bit of HTML and CSS. We won't be expecting them to have Git installed when they show up.

Class format

At OpenTechSchool we tend to go practical and at your own pace.

Practical meaning that we aren't big on theory, or requiring that people understand something completely before using it. We aren't expecting any of the students to become computer scientists. Generally programming for our students is a way of solving some practical problem. If they want to accomplish it with LISP or a spreadsheet is entirely up to them.

At your own pace means that we provide access to the complete course notes at the beginning of the session. Then students can progress individually. Some students will get through very quickly, others will take some time, and most will finish the core work with time to spare. The core work should be completable by everyone. To keep things interesting we supply various additional topics which are entirely optional.

A class schedule looks like this:

1200 - Students still arriving, writing name tags, setting up laptops.
1230 - Introductions, wifi instructions and location of coursework.
1235 - Students learn stuff.
1545 - Thankyous, maybe demonstrations.

As you can see, the schedule just has a big chunk of 'learn stuff'. We like to keep things open.

For this course, because we are doing social coding, we might shake up the format a bit and get students interacting with each other. After all, we are trying to be social :)

Author Guide

So, fork this repository. The guide is written as a Jekyll site, hosted on GitHub pages. It's set up so you can just write pages in Markdown. A markup guide is below.

Course work goes under core/ or extras/. It's all linked together by index.md in the root direcory.

• core/ covers the basic goals of the course. In this course that means setting up Git, creating a GitHub account, creating a repo, etc etc. Put any images in core/images/
• extras/ are all the interesting things people can do once they have completed the basics. Things like hosting with GitHub Pages, or doing Pull Requests and exploring GitHub can be done here. Put any images in extras/images/

It's easiest to start at the end. Think of a fun and interesting topic to add to the extras. Then you can copy this file to get an idea for formatting.

Markup Guide

First level section

Second level section

Third level section

Fourth level section

• List item
  • Sub item
  • Sub item 2
• List it m 2

1. Ordered list item
2. Ordered list item 2
3. Ordered list item 3

• Sub item 1
• Sub item 2

4. Ordered list item 4
5. Ordered sub item 1
6. Ordered sub item 2
7. Ordered list item 5

emphasis text for emphasis

strong text for strong

Getting literal with backticks

Or use an indent of 4 spaces,
to get yourself a code block,
that looks lovely.

Do a bit of blockquoting. You can still reflow the text as much as you like. Newlines are awesome. And made of win.

links for nerds

links for internal stuff

This is a horizonal rule:

---

If you want to highlight some ruby code:

def foo
    puts 'foo'
end

Bit of command line:

$ holla holla
get dolla
$ 

For a more complete list of languages see highlight.js