GitHub launched the GitHub Learning Lab today, a program that aims to help developers learn new skills without having to leave GitHub. In addition to learning and surfacing new skills, the lab will also help developers apply those skills to the software development platform.
“GitHub is more than a home for code. It’s a forum for collaboration, a sandbox for testing, a launchpad for deployment, and often, a platform for learning new skills,” Cynthia Rich, learning manager at GitHub, wrote in a post.
The lab is based off of the experience of the GitHub Training Team, which has already established an approach for training thousands of people on the inner workings of Git and GitHub.
The GitHub Learning Lab is in the form of an app that can be accessed directly through GitHub. The app features a bot that will present users with a series of labs and critique performance along the way.
“With GitHub Learning Lab, you’ll learn through issues opened by a bot in a GitHub repository,” Rich wrote. “After you finish tasks, the bot will comment on your work and even review your pull requests like a project collaborator would.”
The launch of GitHub Learning Lab is accompanied by the launch of the GitHub Learning Lab Community Forum, where users can consult the community of learners and trainers.
Currently, the learning lab features five modules: An introduction to GitHub, how to communicate within the repository, how to host a website or blog from the repository, moving projects to GitHub, and managing merge conflicts.
Still to come is a course on contributing to open source.
“This is just the beginning,” Rich wrote. “We’ll be expanding how this app helps new developers, inviting new course authors, and adding more topics as we go.”
