GitHub’s Following, Watching, Starring, and Pinning Features

When I started my coding bootcamp and was first introduced to GitHub, one of my instructors said that GitHub was basically his Facebook. At the time, that surprised me. Wasn’t this site only good for version control and saving all your coding files in the cloud? How on earth could it be “social”?

After more than a month of usage, I think I’m starting to get its social elements.

Following

• When they create a new repo
• When they fork an existing repo
• When they follow another user

Watching

• Watch other users’ repos by going to a user’s repo, then on the “Watch” icon in the upper right corner, select “All Activity” on the dropdown
• See all the updates to this repo in your dashboard’s “All activity” feed; essentially, you’ll get a notification in your dashboard every time that repo commits
• Use this to keep track of any updates, either on friends’ repos or on repos that you use as dependencies

Starring

• You can easily access all your starred repos from your profile page, so you don’t need to search for it every time (just click the star icon next to the “following” link under your profile picture)
• GitHub’s algorithm rates repos (in part) by how many times they’ve been starred, so starring a repo will help it appear higher in search results
• Important Caveat: Starring a repo doesn’t automatically “watch” it; if you want to get updates on commit history, you need to “watch” it in addition to “starring” it

Pinning

• To other users, your pinned repos look like your highlight reel
• For you, some of them can be repos you just need to reference a lot

Mostly, these save you time because you don’t need to keep searching for the same thing over and over again. Unsure what a user’s handle is or what they’ve done lately? Shouldn’t be an issue if you follow them. Want to know if a dependency you use in a project has been updated recently? Watch it, and you’ll know when it does. Constantly find yourself using a repo that someone else made as a reference guide? Star it, so you don’t need to look it up each time. Constantly find yourself using one of your own repos as a reference guide? Pin it, so you don’t need to keep looking it in your repo list each time.

I don’t know that GitHub has completely replaced Facebook for me, but doing the above has definitely pushed me even closer to that point.