From a Local Folder to GitHub, Using Git and SSH
Before this week, my GitHub profile was mostly a place where projects sat as plain uploaded folders. I had never taken a project through the actual Git workflow from scratch, starting a local repository, track changes properly, and push it up over SSH instead of typing a username and password every time. This article walks through how I did that for the first time, using one of my own data science projects (an EPL results analysis notebook I had been building locally) as the real example.
The point of this article isn't to define Git and GitHub in the abstract. It's to show, step by step, what actually happened on my machine when I turned a folder sitting on my laptop into a proper, version-controlled GitHub repository.
The starting point: a folder, not a repository.
I had a project folder on my machine with a Jupyter notebook, a CSV of match data, and a few helper scripts. Nothing in that folder was being tracked by git yet it was just files sitting on disk. This distinction matters: a folder only becomes a Git repository once you deliberately initialize it. Until then, there is no history, no staging area, and nothing to push anywhere.
