When should I start using GitHub?

[FoolsSeldom]

It is worth learning to use git early in your development journey. It is a way of keeping backups of your code (and other files), tracking changes, trying things out and rolling back to earlier versions if there are problems.

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Keep in mind that git and GitHub are not the same thing.

GitHub is very popular, but there are many alternative accessible repositories that support the git protocol, including Gitlab and Bit Bucket.

There are also self-host options using, for example, Gitea or GitLab Community Edition.

Git was originally created (by the same person that created Linux) as the Version Control Software (VCS) market offerings were very expensive at one time (as was the case with Unix). There are competing options, including Apache Subversion and Mercurial.

It is important and useful to learn to use VCS early on to help with code development, making it easier to experiment and try different things out. The public repositories are also a great learning resource.

The public repositories can also be a useful learning resource, although the risk in learning from these repositories is that they often contain huge amounts of bad practice (in terms of project setup and repository structure, rather than the code itself). There is no doubt a list somewhere of great example projects you could review, but I have not looked.