Week One Technical Blog Post
February 5, 2015
Come and Git It
Version control, roll it around on your tongue one more time, version control. Sounds like some thing the Terminator would say. As a gamer save points are gold; every time one is reached “wheeeew safe”. A boss just crushed you? No problem save point! That, my friends is version control in a nut shell. Whenever a change occurs in the material being worked on, whether it’s code, spread sheets or the manuscript for the next best selling crime thriller, version control will log the change and allow you to roll back the change as if it never occurred. So how do you use version control you ask, well that’s what git is for.
Git, sounds like an insult from the old south doesn’t it? Slow down, the inventor is not American and cannot be blamed for how it may make you feel.(He actually stated that it is named after him; git being a British insult meaning “jerk”). His name is Linus Torvalds and is mostly famous for creating Linux an open source operating system (this is being written on a machine running Linux). So what does git actually do, you ask? Git is what you use to save your game as we alluded to earlier ,and recall (or revert) to that (or any other saved) point in time/development. Git also has tools to combine changes and has a detailed log of every edit. But what about multiple developers? If you are in Bora Bora and your partner is in Nome? No problem thats what GitHub is for.
GitHub is a website that is big into anime. Don’t believe me? Their logo is a cross between an octopus and a cat called Octocat. This Octocat passes git repositories between developers. Ha I know I’m pretty lame I can’t help it. To stick with gaming analogies GitHub is like playing on Steam. You download the game from Steam and play it on your computer but many stats are saved online. GitHub is similar in it that it allows people to upload projects online making it possible for anyone to download it to their own computer and make improvements. After working on their locally downloaded copy users are then able to “push” it back to GitHub, where it gets reviewed and if found to be useful, added and merged with the main repository. There are millions of public repos on GitHub currently, with more being added every day. So come on and join us its never too late.