Git at a glance For Non-Tech Folk.

You may or may not heard of Git, no not the old school English slang.

If you create software professionally or plan on doing so then you will most likely use it at some point. Likewise if you come into contact with Developers in your job in any capacity you may of heard it mentioned.

What is Git?

Git is a distributed version control system, in short it’s normally used by Software Developers to track & manage changes to code in projects.

Why?

Have you ever written an essay on a computer and needed to undo something you did or get back to a certain point before some of your changes?

You would normally hit ‘ctrl+z’ to rewind what you did or worse still (before the current times of frequent live saving) you would have multiple versions of your essay in a folder corresponding to different points of progress.

If you were writing an 100,000 word essay whilst collaborating with say twenty different people, from different time zones but all editing the same piece. . . well you can quickly see how this would get problematic.

Thats where Git comes in.

Git enables you to track every change , once you make a change to a file you ‘add’ then ‘commit’ that change this is like saving except you add a message along with your save.

What this means is several people can all work on the same file and each of their changes has a meaningful message, time stamp and is logged as their change. This make reversing bad changes significantly easier.

With Git we can do things like:

1.Track the entire history of changes made to a file and exactly who made them & when.

2.View the files at any point in their history. How your essay looked at any particular point.

For small projects it can feel like overkill but TRUST me it can save a mountain of time in the long run. Being able to view everything in a project so openly increases collaboration, helps you track progress & so much more.

. . . . There is much MUCH more to Git, how its used but that a matter for another more in depth article.

I hope this has given you a really high level/extremely basic overview of Git.

If its been helpful hit the clap button , any support I get is really appreciated!

If you want more in depth Git knowledge but don’t want to wait for me to write an article I’d highly recommend GitHub’s Handbook