GitHub — Code in the Cloud

Git lives on your machine. If your laptop is stolen, that history is gone.

GitHub is where your Git history lives in the cloud — backed up, accessible from any machine, shareable with collaborators, and connected to Vercel for automatic deployment.

What GitHub Is

GitHub is a hosting platform for Git repositories. It is owned by Microsoft and used by virtually every software team in the world — from solo developers to Meta and Google.

The CA analogy: If Git is your internal audit file, GitHub is the cloud document management system where that file is stored securely and shared with the right people. Just as you would not keep a client's working papers only on one laptop, you do not keep your project's Git history only on your machine.

The Two Core Actions

Push — send your commits to GitHub

git push origin main

This takes all commits on your local main branch and uploads them to GitHub. Your history is now in the cloud.

Pull — bring changes down from GitHub

git pull origin main

If a collaborator pushed new commits (or if you pushed from another machine), this downloads those changes.

That is the entire collaboration model: push your work up, pull others' work down. No emailing files. No version confusion.

Why GitHub Connects to Vercel

GitHub is not just a backup. It is the trigger for your entire deployment pipeline:

You push to GitHub  →  Vercel detects the push
                    →  Vercel builds your app automatically
                    →  Live URL is updated in minutes

Every project you build in this programme follows this exact flow. You push code to GitHub; Vercel picks it up and publishes the new version. No manual deploy steps.

This is why GitHub comes before Vercel in this session — it is the connection point.

Hands-On: Create a Repository

1. Go to github.com and sign in (or create a free account)
2. Click New repository
3. Name it sahinov-training-practice, set it to Private, click Create repository
4. GitHub shows you the commands to connect your local repo. In your terminal:

# In the my-first-repo folder from the Git exercise
git remote add origin https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/sahinov-training-practice.git
git branch -M main
git push -u origin main

5. Refresh GitHub — your README.md is there

You have just moved a local project to the cloud. From this point on, every git push backs up your work and triggers Vercel to deploy.