Version Control System
In this article, we will see what is the version control system. If you have heard the term version control, it’s a very cool technology and it is super useful especially if you are a software engineer, web developer, etc. The most popular version control system is GIT.
What is GIT?
GIT helps us manage our project’s files. Now a project could be anything let’s imagine that we are building a website, so our project would have all kinds of files and it would have HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc., Now the question becomes what does git do? that makes managing our files easier.
History
Git keeps track of every change we make to our project. Let’s imagine that we adjust the CSS on a website, maybe we delete a few styles or add styles. We think that everything’s great but a month later, we discover that our code changes broke the layout on a few pages.
Instead of scratching our heads and trying to remember what code we adjusted a month ago and involving a bit of guesswork. We can have git tell us exactly on which day we changed which files and it will even show us which lines of code we added or deleted.
Collaboration
If you have ever tried to create something on the computer with a group of people or a team of people. You know that a common concern is trying to avoid accidentally deleting or overwriting each other’s progress. To illustrate this let’s look at collaboration without Git. For example, imagine we are writing a book and we finished the first one-and-a-half chapters. And we send an email to our friend with a word processing file attached and we say ‘hey buddy here’s the 1st chapter’ do you mind maybe making a few edits? And finishing the 2nd chapter for me and then sending the attachment back to me. Now the moment you send that email, you are frozen/stuck you can no longer work on the book yourself until your friend emails you back with the updated file, why?. Because you want to make sure that you aren’t stepping on each other’s toes, so let’s imagine that you did make a few edits right after sending that email. So, when they send the file back to you, both of your copies are out-of-date. So, we use GIT for collaboration and git is a version control system
