{: .text-center}
You've read the article, and now you're here to contribute to your first open source project! {: .text-center}
It's time to leave a message for everyone who comes after you. {: .text-center}

{: .text-center} You can find the welcome wall file here

This is the official repository for the Towards Data Science Article,

Getting started with Git and GitHub: the complete beginner's guide (plus the easiest way to contribute to your first open source project ever!)

This is a tiny project that only exists to welcome newcomers to the GitHub process. If you are totally new to the Git and GitHub thing and you need a safe place to figure out how to clone a repository, make a change, and create a pull request, you're in the right place.

Give it a try!

I'm not going to judge you for trying and I'm not going to judge you for making mistakes. (I'm not going to judge you at all if you're here to learn!) There's no reason to be here besides figuring out how all of this works, so you're in great company if you make a few mistakes. It's just part of the process!

Just go for it!

Your mission is simply to fork the repository, create a branch where you add a positive welcoming or encouraging note for everyone who comes after you, and then create a pull request to have your message added to our wall. Be proud that you have come this far! Be encouraging! Don't ever forget how hard the first few steps of any journey can be.

Thinking way too hard about this? Feel free to copy and paste this message:

Welcome to GitHub! You're amazing. Congratulations for making it this far!

Sign your name to that if you're feeling a little bit brave!

Now let's get started!

It's all in the article! You're going to fork this repository, try creating a branch, edit the welcome_wall.md file to add an encouraging message (or some other cool communication) to the next person, and create your first pull request!

Definitely

• You need to have access to a computer
• You need to have a GitHub account

Probably

• You might want to check out the article first
• You should have Git installed on your computer if you can
• You might want to know how to access your terminal so you can practice the whole thing
• It would be good to have a text editor so that you can grab the file and edit it on your computer just because learning is what this project is about.

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on this project.

Please read CODE_OF_CONDUCT.MD for details on our code of conduct.

• Anne Bonner
• Everyone of you who makes a successful pull request!

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Here's the intro if you landed here without it:

Looking to get started with Git and GitHub? Do you need to collaborate with a team? Are you working on a project? Have you recently discovered that you pretty much need to be on GitHub if you want anyone to take you seriously in tech?  …do you really just want to contribute to your first open source project?

This one's for you!

It's totally easy to get started with Git. If you're a fast reader (and you don't take a lot of time with sign up and installation), you can be up and running on GitHub about ten minutes from right now. 

If you go all the way through the article, you can practice cloning an existing repository, creating a branch, making changes, and then committing those changes. 

If you do all that, congratulations! You will have contributed to your first open source project! This article will get you up and running with the basics. There's a lot of stuff to learn if you want to use Git and GitHub like a pro, of course. You can go way beyond this introductory information! We're going to leave the next-level stuff for another time, though.

Let's get started!

Read the rest of the article here!

I absolutely reserve the right not to add anything that I think might send the wrong message or cause problems, and I will remove without hesitation anything that someone else feels sends the wrong message. If you think that there is a message on here that's negative and you would like it removed, all you have to do is reach out and let me know and I will take it down. I may also resize and/or relocate messages and images, etc. if and when it makes sense to do so.