2025 EES GitHub: Open Source Maintainership: Leveraging GitHub to Launch Your Career

Yo, what’s going on everybody? My name is Cam and I’m on the CodePath Career Center team and we are excited to welcome you to our next breakout session. I’m excited to be here today to work with a amazing group of folks from Git GitHub who are going to be giving us a really amazing session today.

Before I introduce the session, a few reminders. Please utilize the chat and keep your comments relevant to the session. Don’t want to see no LinkedIn URLs at all.

Please also take a minute at the end of the session to give us your feedback. With the reminders out of the way, I’m excited to introduce this session on open source maintainership leveraging GitHub to launch your career with Morgan Ursery and Phoebe Quincy. Morgan Ursery is a senior program manager on the GitHub education team focusing on partner engagement and student resources.

She’s passionate about building opportunities for all learners to collaborate and thrive. Prior to her time at GitHub, she worked in higher education helping students and young artists hone their skills before transitioning into doing the same for young technologist in edtech. BB Quincy is a senior manager for GitHub education community for students, teachers, and schools.

She previously ran Hacktoberfest and open-sourced initiatives at Digital Ocean, built education communities at Elastic, and graduated from a full stack web development boot camp herself. An English major turned program manager, BB’s reinvented her career more than once, and is passionate about bringing people together to learn, grow, and build. Outside of work, she’s a proud mom of two, sci-fi and house music enthusiast, and a coffee loving adventurer who values adaptability, authenticity, and community.

Please give it up for Morgan Ursery and Phoebe Quincy. Hello. Hey everyone.

Thank you. So cool to see all the hands clapping and the hearts. Awesome.

Thanks for the warm welcome. Yeah, thanks so much. Well, wow, we got such a nice intro from Cam up top, but we will get started with sharing a little bit more about our backgrounds.

We’re really excited to be here today. As Cam mentioned, I come from the world of higher ed. I worked at Parson’s School of Design to start out my career.

So, I did a lot of things with young educator. Yeah, well, young artists and it was also amazing before transitioning into edtech. So, I have a background in art.

I actually have two art degrees and found my way to tech anyway. So, there’s like no wrong way to move through your career journey. Trust me.

And I’ve been working at GitHub for the past a little over three years working with Phoebe on the education team. We’ll get dive we will dive into a lot more about what’s going on with the education team, what benefits are there for students and what type of resources that we have on hand for you to both learn and help launch your careers into tech. But I will throw it over to Phoebe to introduce herself a little bit and then we will dive right in.

Yep. Hey everyone. So great to be here.

Love working with students. It’s my it’s my favorite. I like Morgan have had a a career in tech for quite a while now, but originally didn’t start there.

I was an English major and I I never thought that I would go into tech. And I was a teacher. I taught kindergarten and preschool.

But eventually I started doing admissions for a boot camp and I started realizing that most of the folks that I was admissions advising for were just like me looking to get, you know, leveled up in their careers and make more money and be more stable. And so I thought, okay, if they can do it, I can do it. So, I basically sold myself on the program and quit my job and did a a six-month full stack web development immersive at Galvanize.

And that launched me into my tech career where I have pretty much always kind of stayed in the realm of education and developer advocacy, kind of always in the community space, helping others to learn and grow. And so, that is my my favorite place to be. So happy to be here and I’ll pass it back over to you Morgan.

Okay, we are going to dive into our presentation. So if we Okay. It looks like we can Yes.

Can we all see that? I think we can. Yep.

I can see. Awesome. So to just get us started, thank you so much for thumbs up.

I love it. To get us started, I’m going to go back one. So, this presentation, this workshop is really about leveraging GitHub for your professional development.

We’re going to get into the value of open-source contri, you know, contributing and maintainership. And we’re going to get into some ways that GitHub can really be used and maybe ways that you have not already used GitHub to help you, you know, display your work, to launch your career, to network, and to really like project manage that entire experience. So, just a little bit of, details about what we’re going to go over today.

We’re going to give you an overview of learning with GitHub and tools you can access for free as a student or if you are going to soon not be a student, getting benefits really soon and being able to use those to launch your career and and as you’re kind of like looking at your your job search journey, understanding GitHub’s value for professional growth. That’s where we’ll get into a little bit more of like open source maintainership and open source contributing. Learning practical steps to showcase your skills.

And then some tips on how you can use AI and Copilot in particular within GitHub to help you do all these things. So, hopefully folks are adding questions in the Q&A. We really like a more conversational type of, type of presentation, so feel free to ask also in the chat.

I got some good questions in there already. I know there’s like Oh, in the Q&A. I know I’m seeing stuff through.

So yeah, really excited to get to those. We probably will maybe try to address them as we’re we’re we’re as we’re talking to some of them will be answered at the end. So we’ll have a Q&A at the end, but we’ll also if you put in the main chat, we’ll try to get to some of those.

So as I said, the vibe is interactive. Ask us questions because we love to answer as we go along. To give a quick overview of the education ecosystem.

We Phoebe and I are on the education team and I oversee a lot of our like partnerships and resources. If anyone has heard of the student developer pack, that is something that I basically oversee. So, what I do a lot, you’ll see the first little little logo there, is I work with a lot of industryleading partners and tools and products to try to get them to give me to get to y’all for free basically.

So, my passion is to like get like students resources so that they can learn. And the GitHub education team is responsible for basically a lot of what you see on this slide. So our mission really is to empower the kind of like the to to power empower and foster a collaboration between students and educators across the globe and to really support the next generation of developers.

So we do that through the student developer pack. Phoebe oversees the campus program which works with schools and institutions. We have the campus experts program which is like our version of a student ambassador type of program.

And some benefits that you would get through some like like student developer pack and a few different things if you’re kind of like keyed into our resources are like enhanced use of code spaces, use of copilot pro and a lot of educators that we work with also leverage GitHub classroom in their classrooms to you know send out like assignments that you know like at scale and things like that. So there’s a lot that like the GitHub education team oversees and that includes like trying to support millions of students across the globe which we’re really proud of and a lot of a lot of educators as well. Why GitHub Phoebe?

Why GitHub? So most developers in the world today are utilizing GitHub to house their code. So it is one of the largest platforms and most powerful platforms for collaborating with other engineers and doing your development work.

So it’s really a key tool that is used widely in industry and will be very important for you as you make your way into the tech industry. But on top of that it’s actually just a really useful tool. We use it all day every day and it’s one of the major ways that our team collaborates.

If you’re familiar with Git, you know that it’s a version control system, but on top of that, it’s also the best way to be able to collaborate on projects that you’re working on with a team. So, there’s lots of ways that GitHub can really help drive your career. And it is focused on building tools and pro providing resources and services that help you as the developer.

And it’s also AI powered. So, GitHub Copilot is our AI tool and we’re going to be talking a bit more about that later on, but it’s it’s a really awesome thing that has helped accelerate a lot of our work and we would love to see more people utilizing it because it’s a really great and fantastic tool. Okay.

So, personal branding through GitHub. So, one I just want to key us into a couple of Q&A questions that are gonna feed back into what we are about to talk about. And that is there’s a question that came in that says, "How can I highlight class projects or labs on GitHub so they look professional to employers?" I think that’s pretty relevant to what we’re about to talk to as well.

And what strategies have you found most effective for making meaningable contributions to to a large open source project when you’re just getting started? So I want us to have those in mind, Phoebe, as we’re thinking about this slide and our demo that we’re going to have pretty soon as we kind of like flow into our next little thing. So, I’ll talk a little bit about this and then Phoebe is going to demo some stuff for us.

It’s going to be very, very fun. And we will kind of talk a little bit about both how to leverage some of what you’re doing and display it on GitHub in your readme, but also some tools that you may not already know of that can actually showcase your skills in different ways. So, the first thing you’re want to think about is your GitHub profile and your profile readme and just kind of thinking about that as an ecosystem in and of itself.

So, what would you like to display to folks? And how would you like to display what you’re doing, the level of skills you have, projects you’ve worked on, how much you’re contributing to open source projects, etc. I will start at the top because this is a really great question that we got, in a workshop we did over the summer, which is, you know, like who actually looks at your your your your GitHub profile and at what stage in like a recruitment process or something like that. Which I think is a great question because that is going to help shape what you end up putting on your GitHub profile.

And what I’d say is the folks that are going to be looking at that the folks are going to be looking at that is going to be folks that are like looking at you as like a part of a hiring committee or part of someone who is going to be actually working with you. So the first folks that actually see your GitHub profile aren’t going to be like the people that are like doing topline recruiting. So like talent managers, things like that.

Those are going to be folks that are just going to be looking at like your resume, possibly your LinkedIn, and a few other things. The folks that are going to want to really see what languages you, you know, you are really great at, like the level of skills you have, the projects you’ve worked on are going to be the folks that are actually going to be working with you. So that’s going to be hiring committee, hiring manager, folks that are going to be potentially on your team.

So, when you’re thinking about what you are going to be displaying on some of these profile readmes, you want to think about really communicating those things to folks who will like be of that mindset. So, they’re going to be a little bit more technical. They’re going to be thinking about what projects they’re currently working on and how you fit into those.

And they’re going to be thinking about, you know, you and some of your interests as well. So, I’m going to stop sharing really quickly because I do want to share those are Okay. So, if you are F.

Thank you, Phoebe. So, Phoebe put some profile links in the chat. So, those profile links that we were we’re going to like take a look at.

And they’re really important because they key you into a few different really great examples of how you can demonstrate and display your interests, your work, your passions and things like that that I think are just like excellent excellent examples. So, let’s take a quick look at some of them. And while you’re doing that, I’m just going to call out that one of the questions that we got from Menraj was, "Do recruiters value GitHub activity commits contributions even if the projects are small?" I responded to that one.

Recruiters are going to look to see if you have GitHub listed on your skills because that’s going to fit the job description, but they’re not going to specifically dive into your contribution chart or anything like that. However, the hiring team, like Morgan just said, is going to look more closely at your GitHub. This is where your GitHub profile can really come in handy.

Okay. Okay. So, let’s take just a quick look at some of these in case folks want to take a quick look.

So, let me see really quickly. One, two, three. Okay.

So, Okay. So if you see this is one of our developer advocates, Lady Kerr. She’s incredible.

This is a super wonderful and professional, profile readme that gives a really brief overview of what she does, what she’s passionate about. So nice bullet points, her technical focus, and then a little bit of like fun video, where and how to connect, what organizations she’s a part of. So that’s really interesting as well, the achievements she’s gotten, and then here on the side, like also all the ways that you can connect and make sure that you’re connected with her.

And then a really brief like kind of like quick bio as well. And if you scroll down, she’s got pinned some of the major projects she’s worked on. So, we definitely recommend finding and pinning.

I think it looks the best when you have like four there. And then she’s got her contribution graph as well. And some of her commits, etc. If you as you keep scrolling down.

So, this one is incredible because it’s really concise, really professional. It looks great there. It’s easy to read.

And you get a sense of the types of things she’s interested in. It’s easy to find all of the pinned projects she’s worked on. And u she kind of like gives you a nice overview.

There’s plenty of links here. And it shares kind of like what she’s all about, right? So that one is really great.

And let’s see. I’m sorry. I’m see I’m sorry I only have three badges.

So, the other thing I will say, we will show these and definitely take a look at them. And Phoe’s pinned the links there at the top of the chat. Don’t feel like you have to have a super elaborate one.

I think the the main and like really important things to showcase here are a few projects you’ve worked on. Those projects don’t have to be gigantic. They don’t have to be completed, right?

A lot of open source projects are ongoing and never ending. So, like there’s no end in sight, which is fine. So if it’s a fairly new project that’s okay, something that you have contributed to or created yourself, a little bit about yourself and specific things on like what you’re passionate about.

So just like oh I you know or and maybe like one or two the professional or personal highlights that’s related to your kind of like tech experience. So, if you organized an event or were a part of an incredible hackathon or if you were part of CodePath and did some some cool projects there, you want to mention all of those things because it just like helps flush out just kind of your overall tech experience, but also kind of like the type of network that you have as well, which is like you already have this incredible CodePath network. Definitely mentioned that you’re a part of that because you never know someone from the hiring team could be connected to to that in some way.

So Phoebe and I both are connected to different like boot camps that we are in our past. That would be something we’d want to probably highlight just because I I worked at both Full Sack Academy and and Flat Iron School in the past and there’s like a ton of like Flat Iron School grads at GitHub that I had no idea. It’s like that would be something that someone think of like, oh that’s awesome.

Like I have a little bit more of a sense of what her background is just because of that connection. So you want to make sure that you’re doing that. So we’ll talk a little bit about like the technical stuff, but I think it’s also worth sharing just like what languages that you use and have good facility with.

And let’s see. Anything else in particular maybe you think for the readme? Yeah, I mean the reb is really an opportunity for you to show off your personality.

And I feel like these examples that Morgan shared are really great at showing kind of how unique each one of these folks are and kind of where their passions are and their interests. And that’s what your recruiters and your teams are going to be looking for is to kind of get a sense of, you know, who who is this person and and what do they specialize in and what do they like to do? And you know, yeah, that kind of stuff is it’s the warm fuzzy stuff and it’s also the technical stuff.

So, take the opportunity to be creative because it is a really great way to connect with you as a person. Yeah, that’s a great a great point. It balances some of the soft skills as well because again, the folks that are going to be looking more at this GitHub profile are the folks that are on the hiring team, aka your future team potentially.

And they want to know who they’re going to be working with. So as much as you can share about your personality and the things you’re passionate about, the better it’s going to be for them to better understand like, oh, I’d love to work with this person because they’re into all these other things or they’re not into the same things I am too, but they’re super passionate about these things and that’s awesome as well. And there’s a couple other questions that have come in that I also want to get to.

So, those of us with projects that are 60% complete, hold on just a second. Joshua has a great question. Those of us with 39 projects that are roughly 60% complete, should we leave all those repos as private or leave them as public with a note in the readme that it’s in progress?

So in my opinion, I don’t think you’d have to. So, what you’ll want to do is curate. So, a lot of people say for like your resume, right?

You want to curate your resume towards like kind of the the jobs or the companies that you’re going after. It’s kind of similar with when you’re thinking about a profile readme, especially in the context of job searching because you’re going to want to curate those projects, like I said, down I think it looks good when it’s like four maybe six projects that you’ve have pinned there. So you want to curate those down to something that like showcases your skills in a range of ways that is most relevant for the jobs that you’re going after.

Period. So they don’t have to be six, they can be 60% complete. That’s fine.

And they don’t have to be all the way complete at all. You don’t have to say they’re in progress. Like we were saying like when we get to some of the more open source examples of projects in maintainership, open source projects are always in progress, right?

Some a lot of prog like you’re a software developer, you’re always working at a project. Projects are never done you know like in in several senses. So it’s totally fine if a project is not complete or still a work in progress.

You know those projects should have strong readmes and good descriptions and ways and kind of like what the overall sort of like what’s going on with it. But it doesn’t have to be a complete complete project to showcase your skills within that project. Okay.

So the next thing we’re going to do is do a little bit of a demo. So BB, if you’d like to go ahead and share your screen, what we’re going to talk a little bit about is the power of repositories and the power of some of the sort of tools within it and how you can leverage those as well. Yeah.

So, I wanted t to take a chance to kind of talk to you a little bit about this is my test my test GitHub account as a student. And you can see here it’s not very spectacular. I haven’t really spent a lot of time trying to set anything else up here, but you know I and I’m not entirely sure of of where all of your you know sort of skill sets lie and your experience with GitHub, but one thing I wanted to share is that and and I I see some chats going on in the Q&A with questions specifically about repositories like whether they should be private or public.

So I wanted to go through just the exercise of like how do I create a repository? So first you want to name it. And so this one we’re going to name as Phoe’s funtime party bucket.

I don’t know why that’s just what it’s going to be. This is going to be our playground for party time. And then I’m going to make this one public.

I’m going to add a read me because I want to provide instructions and and information always to anyone. This this is one of my biggest pet peeves, y’all. If you go to somebody’s repository and there’s nothing in the readme, it’s very difficult to understand right at a glance what it’s about and what’s going on.

So, I always love to do a readme and I really appreciate good readmes. I’m going to skip the git ignore for now and I’m just going to do a standard MIT license. And then I don’t need copilot to build anything for me right now.

So I’m going to skip that and I’m going to create the repository. Okay. So now I’ve got this repository and this we can say this is like our project.

And so maybe now I want to go ahead and I want to create an issue inside of here. And in this particular issue, I want it to be like define what the party bucket is. And so maybe I write a little bit of instructions here.

Get the team to brainstorm what the party bucket is. And then I’m just going to create this issue. And I’m going to assign myself to it because I’m the one who created this issue.

And that will tell my teammates, hey, Phoebe created this issue. She wants to define what the party bucket is. Your issues come with predefined labels for them.

But you can change these. You can edit your labels. We’re going to call this just a question for now and give it a label.

And that way I can go later and I can search through my issues and I can figure out how many questions are are open right now. This hasn’t been added to a project, but I’m going to go ahead and add it to my Zizbombs RAD project board. And I’ll talk a little bit more about the project board in just a second.

Right now, we’re going to not worry about milestones or or relationships. But now if Morgan wanted to come along and she wanted to suggest something on this particular issue, she can add a comment here. Hey Phoebe, what’s your ideas for the party bucket, you know, and she could add a comment to this.

Which would help ping me and let me know, hey, Morgan has a question about this particular aspect of the project. And I’m just going to pause there and see if folks are having any questions kind of about this repository piece. Morgan, is there anything from the chat?

No, I think we can keep moving. Keep going. Okay.

So, I’m going to move over to the projects piece of this because as you saw, I added to the the project board on ZBomb here. So, if I Oops, I went to packages. I meant to go to projects.

So, here’s Zizbomb’s Brad project. And you can see that I’ve got it set up in a conbon style. I really like this because I can move things around.

I can move my issues around so that I can see what’s, you know, being worked on right now, what’s done. Maybe I add one here that’s like, a new column. And I can label it blocked.

You know, I’ll add like a quick description. Needs more info for now. So, yeah.

Oh, look. We have start up the front end as one of our projects. I’m going to push that to blocked.

And maybe I add a comment on it on why it’s blocked right now. But when we use projects in this view, you can quickly and easily see, you know, what is going on with this particular project and you can communicate with your team quickly and easily to make sure that things are progressing. And another thing I wanted to show here is that when you have a project board that has lots of things in it, you can go to your insights tab and you can see the burnup chart.

And what I like about the burnup chart is it kind of gives you some accountability. Like you can see, oh, okay, hey, look, we kind of stalled out down here, but now we’re starting to make some more movement on things. And you can create new charts too if you want to visualize your issues in a new way.

So this is helpful and like a real world example of how we use this on the GitHub education team is our marketing. All of our marketing is put into issues on on a marketing repository and all of those tickets that people from the team come to our marketing manager and they say, "Hey, I need a social media post. Hey, I need an email newsletter.

I need some design assets." they all go into issues and those issues get created and put onto this marketing board and then we can track how successfully that’s being those tasks are being accomplished. So kind of a fun thing there just to know about is that projects are a really great way to collaborate and do project management. So as you’re getting into say say you decide you’re going to build a game you can bring your team together on your repository invite folks to that and you can start you know breaking down the tasks into discrete issues and then having different people work on the different pieces.

Yeah I’d say I’m seeing a couple of questions and just to pause you really quickly Phoebe about folks saying that like oh sometimes they like do project complete projects on local computer and then then then and only then push them later to GitHub. And I’d say it’s an interesting question. One of the things that Phoebe just demonstrated, right, is like a project management tool basically.

And if you are working on in progress things like you’re saying something someone said like oh I have some projects that are 60% done. If you’re working on projects that are kind of like just getting started and you have something that you’re moving along or if you work working on something that’s already finished, if you bring some of that project management and like overall development into GitHub and have activity of you actually working through this project either from a project management perspective or from a development perspective, these are the type of soft skills that we’re saying can demonstrate to someone that you know how to project manager, which is really important, right? So, it’s like really important to know not just how to like code and things like that.

We want to know how you can bring a project from an idea and work it all the way through to the end. So, it’s really an interesting way and there’s a lot of tools like one of the ones that Pho just showed like this project board to help you do that without leaving the platform. That also is good for employers and recruiters and folks like that to see again.

So th the we’re thinking about the next layer in those folks that might be on a team with you. They want to see that you know how to project manage something, right? Like because that is going to make you that much easier to work with and easier to like understand like their flows, their sprints, etc. So I think like having and some facility with tools like this like a project board and there’s some other couple of tools that we’ll talk about as well.

These are all ways to signal to someone that like you’re ready and like ready to go and it shows you know how to use a lot of different tools on and within GitHub as well. Yep. And I I just was trying to answer a question here in chat but it kind of limited my character so I’m just trying to wrap that up.

But Moheib you asked are projects for a single repo or can you put issues for multiple repos on a project? You can, but it depends on the settings. So, I just put a little bit more information about that in into the into your specific question.

So, if you want to go dive a little bit more deeply, go ahead and and look there. And then, kind of heading back into this, this piece of it about repos and issues and and how to really utilize your your GitHub instance. You’ll notice up here, you’ll see that there’s a little guy up here.

It says chat with Copilot. So, we’re going to go click on that. Morgan, are we ready to go ahead and transition into doing a little bit of co-pilot?

We can. Should we do a preamble on open source first? You want to do it after?

Yes, let’s do a quick preamble on open source. Okay, quick preamble on open source. So Phoebe is about to show us a really cool demo that’s going to get into if you’re looking for projects, looking for projects to build your portfolio, looking for ways to network with other folks, open source is a really great way to do that.

And GitHub is the home of open source. Copilot can help us with that as well. But why open source?

So we have some other I’ll get some some really good links for y’all on how to contribute to open source. Some videos on like what open source is and how to contribute to it, but and some good first issues. But what I really want to say is like open source is really important right now in particular because there was a open source survey done last year that found that the actual like average age of maintainers of open source projects has doubled since 2021 and the share of contributors to open source projects under 26 has dropped from 25% to just 10% since 2021.

So that’s a huge huge change right in in like in fourish years. Which means that there is a general like graying of open source maintainers and they’ll need to replenish that pool of folks that are maintaining open source projects like it’s going to be really important because it’s a it’s a really great way actually just get just to get started but so many companies and open source project you know companies start as open source projects. Open source kind of like contributions and maintainership is a great way to network to build your portfolio and to gain skills in lots of different areas be it like no code documentation accessibility you can you know obviously kind of like do pull and code within the main open source projects but there’s a big range that can actually flesh out other areas of your skill set if you’re trying to through open source contributions so kubern ernetes has a really great contributor playground.

I’m going to link these to TensorFlows contribution ladders also have a great ways to get started. I’m just going to link both of these really quickly so you can find them easily. And if you want to learn more about sort of the grayang of open source, one of our colleagues, Abby just wrote a incredible blog about it, and I will also link it here because it’s something you should read, because I think it’s a really great opportunity for emerging developers.

But one of the ways that GitHub in particular can help you find open source projects to even contribute to in the first place, because that’s like the place where you have to start, right? Is through copilot. So now we’re ready Phoebe to dive back in.

That’s my preamble done. And we’re gonna look a little bit about Copilot and how you can find open source projects through the help of Copilot. Then we’ll do some Q&A.

Awesome. Thank you. So as I mentioned when when I was in well I didn’t mention it but somebody else did that I used to manage Htoberfest.

And if you have not heard of Hacktoberfest, it is a month-long celebration of open source that Digital Ocean sponsors and runs. And it is a gamified way to begin to start making contributions to open source. And as a result of my time there, I got to see many people start their journey in contributing to open source making their first contributions via Htoberfest who eventually went on made network connections became so skilled at making contributions and helping others that they became maintainers of open source projects.

And that eventually got them noticed and they got jobs as a result of their work in open source and became leaders in the open source space and within their their companies. So, it’s a really great way to start developing your development skills and get mentorship and make network connections. What we’re going to do here is we’re going to use co-pilot to help us.

And what I would love is a little bit of help from the audience. So if you could if you can share with me what is an if you were going to work on sort of your passion project where you got to you know do the thing that you really love like say you’re really into gaming say you are really super interested in in healthcare I don’t fintech whatever your interest is somebody give me an interest if you wouldn’t mind like drop your passion into the chat like if you want to work on. Oh, okay.

Awesome. Music. Design.

Okay, cool. This is really language learning. Yeah, sustainability.

Dogs. U, cyber security. Okay, but these are all really, really good.

Okay, so now what I’m going to do, dogs are also an interest of mine. I’m gonna go into co-pilot right now and I’m gonna have to help me find some good first issues. So, here’s my prompt.

I’m gonna say, "Can you when I can spell, can you help me find a good first issue or opensource project that involves music or is or is a music tool. And we’ll see what it comes up with. Okay.

Well, first of all, so Copilot says, here are some recommendations. And first of all, it’s going to send us to goodfirst.dev. So, I’m going to open up a new tab and go there so that we can take a look at this.

And can you see this now? I think it’s Yes. Okay, good.

I want to double check and make sure if I switch tabs if it would show it. So, you can see here that there are some some good first issues listed here. But I don’t know.

Some of these don’t look like they’re really focused on I mean, Ethereum, that’s like, you know. Yeah, we’re This isn’t really music related. But browse the music topic.

Okay, let’s try looking at that. Oh, okay. Here are 19,519 public repositories matching this topic.

Okay, so H. Okay. Yeah.

Wow, there’s a lot of cool music projects, but I don’t know if all of these are, you know, open source, if they’re seeking contributions, or even like what language they are based in, right? Like we are looking for something. Yeah.

It’s like if we want like Python ones or you know like or rust, you know, how do we how do we do that? A music project that is seeking contributions. Okay, we a an opensource music project that is seeking contributions in Python and let’s see if that kind of refined it enough.

All right. Neats music library manager and organizer written in Python. It helps you catalog your music collection.

Issues for new contributors. Check for issues labeled good first issue or help wanted it. Okay, let’s go there.

Let’s take a look and let’s see what the read me says. All right. So, here’s the contributing doc.

All right. And look, it’s giving us, you know, all the instructions that we need to get started. Both programming and non-programming types of contributions.

Yeah, that’s really nice. All right. Amazing.

So, it’s that easy, which is awesome. And it might take some refining, right? I wonder what audio GPG is.

That looks interesting. Like that one. Let’s see.

Let’s see what they’re Let’s see if they have Okay, they aren’t putting this into their capabilities. But ultimately, what you want to do is like you want to get to the point where you’re contributing enough that you could be added as a contributor over here in the sidebar. This is something that will get linked to your account.

And somebody was mentioning in the chat that this is where you can pin this project on your profile if you’re listed as a contributor. Let’s go to the readme. Oh, no. We already did the readme, but let’s see if they have a contributing piece.

Okay, maybe this one isn’t as great for trying to figure out, but I wonder if they tag any of their issues as good first issue contributing guidelines. Here we go. Oh, there you go.

Well, this is just a wonderful resource on Yeah, it is great. So, actually, I’m going to grab this and drop this in the chat because this is a great resource in general. I’ll go back to the chat here.

All right. So, that was just a quick way to show how the prompts that you use to search for things. The more specific you can be, the better result you’re going to get.

And I I encourage you all to go check out Copilot Chat. You can use you can just go to I don’t know if you’ve already shared this link but Morgan but it’s just sorry hub copilotcopilot. It’ll take you right to the chat and it’s just like chat GBT.

You can use it that way, but it also will allow you to work within a repository. So maybe I’ll just show that really quickly. Like if I go back to my to my GitHub and I go back to my repository.

Here we go. I go chat with Copilot. Now you can see right here it’s it’s doing it’s saying, "Okay, I’m going to help you within this repository." So, it’s localized to what you’re actually working on.

And then one other thing I wanted to point out quickly before we leave is that if you are one of our verified students, so you apply for student benefits, you can get access to not generally available yet, you can get a private preview of some features that are coming for C-Pilot like agents and spaces. So, that’s one of the great benefits of applying for student benefits at GitHub is that you get a sneaky peak and you get access to things that you don’t if you’re not a verified student. Yes.

So, what I’m going to do really quickly is drop a few links, resource links in the chat. This one is the really great docs that docs for using your GitHub readme as a resume builder. The most helpful panel all day.

Wow, that’s such a a great that feels wonderful. Thank you so much for saying something. I want to drop another one that we found that is how to add GitHub to your LinkedIn account which is also really a great great note.

And then I also want to add a link to GitHub learn. So, seglearn.github.com. This one, we’ll get to the general Q&A in a minute.

That one is also really great for learning beyond beyond the classroom little like modular like exercises really how to dig into C-Pilot MCP servers how to use those and like really really be empowered to use them throughout your developer process. And then see if there’s any other links like really good like resource links to to share. One I do have also is oh the good first issues for good first issues for good first issues are kind of like social impact focus good first issues as well if you’re interested in sustainability accessibility climate you know climate change things like that that one is also really really great so wanted to share a bunch of resources for y’all too and then I do have a mini spiel on just like recruitment etc from GitHub.

So I’m going to share the GitHub early in profession link. This is what the recruitment team is told us to share as far as folks who are interested in internships or early early in career positions. They are going to be posting their internships in October.

Baby and I are not on the recruitment team. Don’t ask. I don’t know a lot a lot of details, but I asked them and that’s when they’re going to be posting their their internships.

But that yeah, but also bookmark that link. Also be sure you’re following GitHub on the LinkedIn if you’re not already because a lot of times when they post things they and when hiring managers post things, GitHub will always GitHub like the company will always like reshare those and stuff too. So, as long as you’re following GitHub in general, you should get notifications for any other like internships or things that do pop up.

So, I wanted to make sure that y’all are aware of those. Some of the tips that I know are in those questions is just like what kind of like what is GitHub looking for, etc., etc. If you go to that main page, it’s just github.comcareers. There’s a at the very bottom a tab for like GitHub values including like shift tole learn or own the outcome growth mindset.

Those are really GitHub like really foundational GitHub values that as you’re thinking about applying to things, as you’re thinking about weaving in different keywords, as you’re thinking about what your resume looks like, you want to key into some of those GitHub values and understand how those like relate to the work that you’re doing. And I’d also say as much as you can consume in general, this is not just GitHub, consume the content of the companies that you’re interested in. So like watch some of the keynotes that are coming up at GitHub Universe.

They’re going to be virtual online and for free. Pop into the the GitHub podcast or the GitHub like live stream rubber duck Thursdays as some of our developer advocates are going to be like walking through different really cool projects and building live and and like you know pop into the to the blog because you want to know what the company you’re interested in cares about what the road map looks like what they’re like rolling out and what is like their most upto-date sort of like tools and things like that. So that is it.

What is GitHub Universe? She do you want to share what GitHub universe is? GitHub Universe is our company conference.

So it is primarily open to anyone who’s interested in learning about what the latest features are, what new things we’re working on. There’s all types of engagement going on. There’s sessions for everyone.

It’s a two-day conference. There are some special sessions that go on ahead of that conference depending on who you are. But many customers attend this conference and we do have special interest groups that attend like students who are with our campus experts program as well as educators who are leading initiatives within the education community.

We also have great keynotes from some of our executive leaders who are giving sneak peeks into what’s coming for GitHub. So, yeah, all kinds of opportunities to learn. Plus, there’s just a ton of fun stuff and some really cool swag.

We always have really cool engaging booths and activities at GitHub Universe. So, it’s a really fun time. In San Francisco at the end of October and you tickets are still available.

Tickets are available and then if you are unable to get a ticket or or or join in person, the keynotes are though available for free virtually. So those are like live streamed and they’ll be on the GitHub YouTube page as well. So those are the ones in particular that you can reference like you can reference and watch like free and available, but the tickets do cost money to to to be there in person.

All right, Q&A time with what time we have left. Hi, Cam. Thanks for coming back.

No, no problem. Thank y’all. Can we get some love for Morgan and Phoebe in the chat real quick?

Y’all been given so many dope gems. And I feel like you answered a lot of these questions as y’all went through the presentation. So I guess some I’ll just we’ll go and do some rapid fire ones as like a maybe like a TLDDR for what y’all had.

So how about we start with the so I think you answered this one before, but for students and new graduates trying to break into the job market, that experience gap is the biggest hurdle, right? What’s the single most effective way that y’all think a student can leverage the platform, not just as a portfolio, but as a tool to grow professionally? Maybe you want to just recap one of the things you you said like 20 dope ways to do that.

So, maybe you want to give like your TLDDR, here’s what I would do, top three next steps to do on GitHub today. Morgan, do you mind if I jump it? Okay.

So I I did kind of answer this question in in the Q&A section, but I really feel like where part of the problem right now in tech is that it is really difficult to get your foot into the door cold, right? It’s who you know. And so building on that, one of the easiest ways to start developing your own relationships in the tech industry is to start working on open-source projects.

Because when you do that and you become a contributor and you start networking and talking to the maintainers and the other contributors via your projects and your issues and maybe you even go to a meetup or you start joining like a community perhaps like women who code or black girl bites or you know you know those kinds of black girls who code sorry the black girl bites is one of our is one of our developer advocates. So like, yeah, like I I think that the more that you can start develop relationships and the more work that you can do to showcase your skill set, the better off you are. And then that notwithstanding, if you can leverage those into an internship and get your foot in the door, that is a great way to start developing your your path.

Nice. I saw some questions in here that were more about like career transitioning. So, I know that for both of y’all like you’ve had your own experiences like switching careers.

Any general advice that you’d give to students who are switching careers and maybe to make it relevant to the to the topic of GitHub, right? Like let’s say you’re switching careers but you still are in an engineering field. How do you recommend that people who are changing careers leverage GitHub in the process of maybe showcasing themselves in that transition?

I’ll I’ll try to answer both. I’d say for in general switching careers, which I what I found to be most helpful is two things. One is networking with the people who have or are working at this the place that you would like to network, you know, would like to work.

And that is through some of what Phoebe was saying. So, organic networking, like I’m going to this event. I’m going to make it a point to talk to five people at this event.

Or I found a really cool Slack channel. The Slack channel is all about like working as a product manager for these types of companies. I’m going to join the Slack channel and interact like and meet a new person every week.

Like, gamify it for yourself if you can. It’s sometimes kind of helpful. I you know it can be helpful for for GitHub in particular and folks who are trying to transition.

It’s somewhat similar in that you want to be really aware of the workflow concerns, skill sets needed to be on the type of team you want to be on and what the like what what you need to do. So sometimes even within GitHub or within different companies, folks are just like, I would love to connect with you to just better understand like how your team works. Just like really informal kind of like coffee coffee type type chats, really really low lift.

And a lot of people, you’d be surprised in the open source community want to network. They want to meet you. They want to share.

They want to talk about their journeys. Like they’re so excited to do so. So, I’d say don’t be shy in in doing that.

And and like yeah, do your research as much as you can and be creative in in trying to do that research. So, I’d say it starts with kind of like some of the things you’re passionate about again and then like like kind of like it flows from there. But also like make goals for yourself, specific goals that you try to like maybe hit or try to focus on every week, every month.

Because those can also focus some of your energies in some ways and that also you feel and can build momentum that way. Awesome. I’m seeing a lot of love in the chat.

So maybe the last thing I’ll ask y’all is like what’s one piece of advice that y’all had in your early career that you want to leave behind for the folks that are listening to this session today? Oh, I love that question. I love that question.

So, I had an amazing instructor for my web development immersive and one of the things that she taught me because tech can be pretty overwhelming. Especially when you’re getting into, you know, really technical stuff. Just to take one bite at a time, like break it down, like take the bigger problem that you have to solve and break it down into, you know, more digestible pieces and take it one step at a time.

And I apply that to life all the time. I don’t know. My piece of advice.

I I think that I used to feel like I was like behind and like imposter syndrome is really strong and things like that. But I’d say that what I found is that everyone I guess the advice that I got is just like truly everyone is just trying to do their best. No one has like no one is like a full like genius and knows exactly what’s going on and knows everything and is the best at everything.

Everyone is learning all the time. Even senior software developers are learning all the time and can learn from anyone at any time. And I try to keep that in mind like we’re all doing our best and we’re all really I mean it’s like it’s very fitting that Phoebe and I are on the education because it’s like we’re all learning.

We’re all learning all the time. And and our job is to try to like help you if you’re learning and help help that journey kind of like and y’all are doing an amazing job. Can we give it back give some more love to Phoebe and Morgan for this amazing conversation?

Thank y’all both so much and I think this is a perfect time for us to close on out. So thank y’all so much and appreciate your your time here. We’ve reached the end of the session.

We’d like to thank our fantastic presenters Phoebe and Morgan for the conversation. Please drop your appreciation, show some love in the chat. And we would love for you all to take a look at this brief video from our host Bobby D and stick around and give us some feedback on the session.

Now, wasn’t that a great session? Oh my gosh, these breakout sessions are fire and I want to encourage you to attend as many as you can. But let me give you some information before we continue.

So, please take a moment to complete a brief survey to share your feedback. Remember, surveys are what’s going to make us get better, but also let us know what we’re doing really well. To see what’s coming up next, you can head back to the main stage and check out the schedule.

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