GitHub Foundations case studies

GitHub Foundations · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The GitHub Foundations credential is the entry point in GitHub's certification lineup, reached from the Certifications link under the Developers / Learn section of github.com. It is aimed at people who already work with repositories - developers, students, DevOps and project staff - and who want external validation that they understand how GitHub's platform fits together: repository hosting, code review and collaboration as the core, with Actions for CI/CD automation, Code Quality, Code Security and Secret Protection, Codespaces cloud development environments, and Copilot for AI-assisted work forming the surrounding surface. The GitHub Foundations case studies are 5 cases and about 3,081 words.

The force push that deleted a teammate's work

A two-person team keeps product specs in a GitHub repository alongside their code. Priya edits files through the GitHub web editor; Sam works locally from the command line.

588 words, about 3 min 2

2.4 GB repository, 180 MB assets, one sprint

An eight-person game studio stores its Unity project on GitHub. The repository is 2.4 GB; a fresh clone takes about 15 minutes on the office connection.

619 words, about 3 min 3

An approval that no longer means anything

A 14-developer team protects main with a rule requiring one approving review. A .github/CODEOWNERS file lists the platform team for everything under infrastructure/.

594 words, about 3 min 4

Twenty-two minutes per PR and a deploy token that is not there

A maintainer's public repository runs a GitHub Actions workflow on every pull request: a three-version Node matrix, a full dependency install, the test suite, and a deploy step that uses the DEPLOY TOKEN secret. Total runtime is 22 minutes and the organization's included minutes are nearly exhausted.

675 words, about 3 min 5

Sixty-one open issues and a release nobody can describe

A team of six maintains an open-source CLI. The repository has 61 open issues, nine of which are duplicates of two long-standing bugs; several are questions already answered in the README.

605 words, about 3 min