How to use Github to keep track of your learning goals

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First published on October 24, 2020.

After years of hobby programming building sites like this one, a couple months ago I decided to pursue full time work as a web developer. Any career switch takes work, and while I have a variety of technical experience ⊕Computer Science classes in college; 2 years installing, documenting, and teaching proprietary Linux based-systems; and several years of self-taught web development the past months have been filled with more intentional learning and practice as I’ve worked to expand my front-end web development experience and skills by working and learning in public.

Recently GitHub released a new feature that allows you to create a custom README for you profile this is a great way to add personality to your GitHub profile, list what you’re working on, or just add a few gifs. But this feature got me thinking about other ways I could use GitHub as I work and learn.

Why not use GitHub to track my learning progress?

This led me to GitHub Projects. Now I could easily use any number of great project management solutions to keep track of my progress learning — Trello, Asana, or Notion all have generous free tiers that would easily meet my needs — but using Github appealed to me because if I keep it in a public project then anyone can follow along and track my progress.

To set this up I used the same repository that holds my README”The profile README is created by creating a new repository that’s the same name as your username.” -Source, selected “Projects” from the top bar, and then pressed the “New Project” button to create a project to track my frontend development learning progress. There are templates that provide a great starting point allowing you to create a basic kanban board to keep track of your learning goals.

Issues are where using Github for this really shines. New issues can be added to the project and tagged with relevant labels. I’ve created labels for the type of resource (course, book, article) as well as the language or framework that the resource is teaching. Then inside each issue I can create checkboxes for me to track my progress, and once I’ve completed the course I can add any notes, projects, or certifications as a comment in that issue.

Issues also allow other people to suggest additions to my learning path. I’ve created an issue template and if you are interested, you can check out the project, and submit an issue to help me continue learning and growing as a web developer.