The Upskilling Labs workshops

Build practical transferable career skills with GitHub

A workshop series on emerging tech in partnership with DCPL + The Upskilling Labs.

Join the Upskilling Labs for workshops that accompany their peer-led experiential learning programming, where you can joing a project group and build something you care about with emerging technologies. Find the full slate of The Upskilling Labs' events on their Luma page.

August 18: Intro to Git Hub

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About the Workshop: This session is a hands-on introduction to GitHub for people who work on community projects — whether that means organizing events, managing shared documents, coordinating coding projects, or tracking important resources. You don't need any coding experience. We'll cover what GitHub actually is (and isn't), how to create a repository for your project, how to use issues and project boards to track tasks, and how to invite collaborators so your whole team can contribute. By the end, you'll have a working project set up that you can take back to your organization.

​About the Instructor: Aaron McKeever is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where he studied information science and specialized in computational linguistics. At Columbia, he worked as a research assistant and project lead across multiple teams, using tools such as GitHub, Python, and Linear to manage shared projects, track contributions, and coordinate work with remote collaborators. His personal research project — a digital history of early 20th-century industrial networks spanning the US, UK, and Germany — uses GitHub to manage key data files and sub-projects. Additionally, his work includes serving as a deputy board UX/UI designer and training lead on the Columbia Daily Spectator product team. Before Columbia, Aaron spent a year in Germany as a U.S. Department of State CBYX-Y scholarship recipient, and he currently works as an administrative and research professional in Washington, DC.

Sept 22: GitHub 2.0: The Handoff — Building Together Without Breaking Things

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About the Workshop: You've learned to commit and push your own work. But what happens when your code becomes someone else's starting point? In this 90-minute, hands-on session, you'll work in pairs to run a complete team handoff: one partner builds a simple personal web page using an AI builder and ships it to GitHub, and the other pulls it down, makes changes on a branch, and sends it back through a Pull Request — without anyone breaking anything. It's the exact workflow your build-cycle team will live in, practiced once with training wheels on.

​About the Instructor: Aaron McKeever is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where he studied information science and specialized in computational linguistics. At Columbia, he worked as a research assistant and project lead across multiple teams, using tools such as GitHub, Python, and Linear to manage shared projects, track contributions, and coordinate work with remote collaborators. His personal research project — a digital history of early 20th-century industrial networks spanning the US, UK, and Germany — uses GitHub to manage key data files and sub-projects. Additionally, his work includes serving as a deputy board UX/UI designer and training lead on the Columbia Daily Spectator product team. Before Columbia, Aaron spent a year in Germany as a U.S. Department of State CBYX-Y scholarship recipient, and he currently works as an administrative and research professional in Washington, DC.

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