Working on my Gitness

So what the hell is version control and why should I use it? According to Wikipedia, version control is "the management of changes to documents, computer programs, large web sites, and other collections of information." Basically what that means is it is used to keep track of changes so you can navigate back to them if you want to. The beauty of this is that it allows someone to take snap shots of their code at certain points in time and roll all their code back to those snap shots if something happens. This is very usefully when you start writing big and complex programs that can break easily.

One of the most popular version control systems is something called git (not to be confused with Github which we will talk about later). Git is used by many programmers and is a very lightweight yet powerful system to use for version control. You can use git commands from the command line to keep track of your files. You pick and choose which files you want to "commit" to this snap shot. Each commit is now a point in time that you can roll your code back to if you need to. You are also able to create branches. Think of it like this. You just got your program to a working point. You want to add more features but you don't want to mess up what you have so you create a copy, aka branch, of your code. You work on this branch until it is working the way you want then you merge it back with the original code. Now your program is even better without having to mess anything up.

Now for Github. Github is an online hub of git commits. Sounds confusing, I know, but believe me when I say it is a beautiful thing. Github allows users to push their commits to a cloud service that can be accessed wherever there is internet. This is especially useful when working with teams or people as they can now collaborate without having to be in the same room. Through Github, you are able to merge your code with other people working on it. Github is also a vibrant community for open source software. You can find numerous projects to contribute to there.

Until next time!
Zac Barnes