GitHub is a web service for hosting Git repositories. It is not the same as Git — Git is the engine; GitHub is a popular garage. Microsoft owns it; millions of open-source projects live there. You get a web UI, permissions, issues, discussions, and automation (Actions) around your repos.
Your laptop has a local repo. GitHub holds a remote — often called origin. You push commits up and pull (or fetch + merge) others’ work down. That’s how “my project” becomes “our project” with a shared history.
A pull request (PR) is a proposal: “here are my commits — please merge into main.” Teams use PRs for code review, CI checks, and conversation. Solo devs use them too as a discipline to read one’s own diff before merging.
GitHub Pages can publish a static site from a branch or folder in a repo — free tier for public projects. That’s why many “push HTML, get a URL” flows (including Coffee’s Print Punch) end up talking about GitHub and tokens: the API needs to know you’re allowed to write to your repo.
Remember: GitHub accounts, orgs, and billing are separate from Git itself. You’re learning Git’s concepts; GitHub is one place to apply them.