What‘s Not to Git?
What Is Source Control
Source control is the ability to make changes and to keep track of those changes while always being able to go back to the original copy. This concept is the base of how all companies build out their software and how they can implement giant teams of developers to accomplish amazing tasks. This can quickly get out of hand and confusing fast. Hopefully this quick guide can help get you on your way to understanding source control and why it is important for technologists.
To understand source control it is easier to think of the original source, or your main, as a baby. This baby can be raised and changed in many creative ways, but many of these changes can be hard to undue. So what if instead of having to risk the one baby we could clone it, make out changes on the clone, and then only choose to merge it back into the original (main) source once we’re sure the changes impacted our baby the way we intended. In this way we are protecting and ensuring that our end state, our future baby grows into a functioning adult without needing to risk the main baby. If it turns out that both parents like the result of what changes were made to clone baby, only then can we can bring from what the clone baby learned and merge it to the main baby, giving us a more experienced baby that we can build from.
Why Is Source Control Important
Source control is important for technologist because many programs that are being worked on are currently in use or worked on by others. In a typical work environment, and especially at large companies, programming is a team sport with many people working on little pieces of the overall program. One line of code has the potential to break an entire application, or feature of an application. This makes version control and peer reviewing an important part of the job. Even in solo projects technologists use this system to keep track of their progress. It’s important to be able to rollback to previous versions of a project in case any bugs were introduced with new changes.
Whether it’s a small or large project, having some kind of source code management should be a key part of any workflow so that every modification to the code base can be tracked. This is even more important when the code base has many contributors. Having the ability to track, merge, and roll back changes will help ensure a successful project development workflow.
How Is Source Control Used
Now hopefully you can see the importance of source control and why developers must incorporate it into their workflow. Luckily, there are tons of powerful version control software already created specifically to help developers manage their codebases. One such common software is called Git. Git has become a popular software utilized by many companies to provide source code management. Git has many of the features alluded to above such as cloning, branching, forking, and much more. At first glance, Git seems like it has a language of its own. It takes some time to become familiar with the lingo, commands, and becoming comfortable working with Git repositories. The time invested learning how to use Git will pay off as it is important for all developers to learn how to use Git in order to have proper version control whenever collaborating with others. Since Git is free and open source, it is easy to create your own Git repository, clone from existing repos, and practice common Git commands. Using Git even on solo projects is good practice as it’s one of the most common types of version control software out there that you will surely encounter on the job.
