How to use Github and Substack

[I_waste_everything]

For all I know, these or similar services will come to exist in my next happening, and I want to push through my shame of not having dared ask before, and use this time to ask now.

How do I use these? I click on these links saying "check out my substack/github", but then when I land there it's a bunch of folders with seemingly separate files and I have no idea which ones to click, what to do with them, or how to put them together in order to actually get the completed whole it allegedly offers.

Shooting a shot in the dark here, hopefully the first of many. If you know github or substack at all, please offer your thoughts, however many others may or may not have answered. The more input the better.

 

[KM76710]

I have never used Substack. GitHub is a part of Git along with GitLab. GitHub and GitLab are repositories for Git. Git was created by Linus Torvalds who also developed the kernel for Linux. I have downloaded a fair amount of programs from GitHub with no issues. Normally I have just been searching for a particular type of program and will hit a page with a link to the GitHub site and there will be detailed instructions showing how to download. Some programs can be downloaded for Microsoft, Mac or Linux, or in some combination and it is more of exploring what you need and hot do with a specific download.

 

[Grok]

Note, this is a loose lay folks answer, not technical explanation.

Coders and programmers love to copy and paste code instead of rewriting everything. Or make little tweaks to somethings code to fix something. A popular open source program might have thousands of people wanting to fix a typo, make a dialog window look better, or refactor the code so it runs faster. This is a mess to keep track off.

GitHub is essentially the solution. You get a main project (repositories), which keeps tracks of changes, who did the changes and/or allows copies (forks) of the code with those changes etc. It's also a place to host software projects rather than making your own website, and be sure its updated correctly.

So Githubs often contain peoples personal software projects, (this is the bunch of folders stuff) which you can often download a program, or download its code, or copy (fork) its code to work on yourself.

Being humanity, it also gets used for other things not as designed, I've seen collections of pirated books stored as project files.

Substack I dont know, other than as a social media type network.

 

[LumberJack]

Arrived at this late, but I do use git. However I use it for downloading open source software. Usually the folder contains a file called readme.md

md stands for markdown, which is a contrast to markup. The m in html is markup. A git with a readme.md will usually display it as a webpage if you scroll down. It contains an overview and instructions, often including links to self contained installers, such as .exe or .msi in the windows land.

It’s targeted for software developers as mentioned above. So if you’re following a link to a person’s github repository, then it is an online portfolio of the cool stuff that person is working on, in case you are looking for a programmer to hire. As also mentioned above, it may be used for entirely different purposes, but since my profession is coding, I have not had the need to branch out to esoteric use cases.