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FAQ · TOOLS

Do I need GitHub for this course?

No, you can complete the course without it. Joe recommends it strongly, but it's not a hard requirement. Here's what it actually is, why he recommends it, and what to do if you've tried it before and bounced off.

SHORT ANSWER

In the Module 1 video, Joe says GitHub is "strongly recommended but not strictly required." You can finish every exercise and earn the certificate without touching it. But the moment you want to save, share, or version-track anything, it becomes useful fast. If you've never used it, the bonus Git & GitHub module is the gentlest way in. If GitHub already traumatized you once, skip it for now and come back later.

What GitHub actually is, in journalism terms

Madi McCool, a grants and communications manager at the NJ Civic Information Consortium, rebuilt her organization's website using Claude Code without any coding experience. In her bonus interview with Joe, she gives the best one-line shortcut anyone has offered: GitHub is "a Google Drive for code."

Expand that a little and you get the full picture. GitHub is Track Changes for an entire folder, remembered forever, with a copy stored on someone else's servers so you can't lose it. When you save a file in Google Docs, Docs keeps a history of your revisions. GitHub does that, but for a whole project — every file, every change, every note to yourself about why you changed it. You push a copy to github.com and it's backed up, versioned, and accessible from any machine you log in from.

That's it. The rest — branches, pull requests, merge conflicts, forking — is machinery built on top of that one idea.

Why Joe recommends it anyway

Once you start saving files to disk from Claude Code, you'll want four things:

  • ›A history of your changes. "What did I ask Claude to do last Tuesday, and what did it produce?" With GitHub, that's a two-click answer. Without it, you're searching through terminal scrollback.
  • ›A backup on a different machine. If your laptop dies, your work is still on github.com. This is the same reason you use Google Drive for documents.
  • ›A way to share the thing you built. Colleagues, editors, other course participants — send them one link to the repository and they have everything, including the CLAUDE.md context file that makes your tools work.
  • ›A way to use other people's work as a starting point. The course's starter kit is a GitHub repo. You "fork" it (make your own copy), then "clone" it (download your copy) to start working. That pattern is how most tools and templates get shared in this world.

Joe spent years wrestling with Google Drive as a code store before switching. The short version: Drive handles documents beautifully and code files badly. GitHub is the opposite.

If you've bounced off GitHub before

You're not alone. One of your fellow participants in the forums described her last GitHub attempt as "a mess" and said she has "GitHub trauma." Another participant — a developer with decades of experience — said she still asks a git expert at work when things break. GitHub is unforgiving software designed by people who take computers for granted.

Two things help:

  • ›Let Claude Code handle the git commands. You almost never have to type git push or git commit yourself. You say "commit this and push it to my fork" and the tool runs the commands. The commands were the hard part. If you delegate them, GitHub gets a lot friendlier.
  • ›Start with a tutorial written for journalists, not developers. Ben Welsh's First GitHub Scraper walks through creating an account and using it, step by step, in the context of a news scraper. It was written for journalism students. You don't have to build the scraper — the early chapters on setting up the account are worth it on their own.

What to use instead if you skip GitHub entirely

If you're sure you want to stay away from GitHub for this course, here's what each thing it gives you looks like without it:

  • ›History of changes: Copy your project folder to a dated backup before each session. Clunky but it works. Or use your operating system's versioning — macOS Time Machine, Windows File History.
  • ›Backup on another machine: Sync the folder to Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or Google Drive. None of them handle code well, but for the small projects this course asks you to build, they're fine.
  • ›Sharing: Zip the folder and email it, or share a Dropbox link. Your colleague will have to unzip and open it in their own Claude Code session.
  • ›Starter kits: Download the starter kit as a zip file from GitHub (the green "Code" button → "Download ZIP"). You skip the fork-and-clone step and just unzip it locally. You can't push changes back upstream, but you don't need to for the course.

ABOUT THE REQUIRED TOOLS PAGE

The course's required tools list includes GitHub. That's because Joe expects most students to benefit from using it, not because the grading depends on it. If you want the certificate and want to skip GitHub, nothing in the exercises prevents that. Use the zip-download approach for the starter kit and you're set.

GO DEEPER: The bonus Git & GitHub module covers the whole thing at a journalism-first pace. It's optional and ungraded.