Even if your organization does not engage in software development as its primary business, chances are your IT staff is heavily involved in it. Whether it’s tracking bugs or creating your in-house apps, software development is one skill that should be present in your IT department. If you’ve hung around developers often enough, you might have heard the word “GitHub” many times. What is GitHub, and why should you look into using it?
In simplest terms, GitHub is a cloud-based repository for code. It allows you to write your code, store it on the cloud, and have members of your team work on it collaboratively. Here are some reasons GitHub is all the buzz in developer circles.
1) Collaboration. Nothing is more messed up than multiple developers working on the same code, and then making their changes to it independently. Collating all the changes submitted by developers, then making the changes on the original source code, line-by-line, is every lead developer’s nightmare. Fortunately, because GitHub allows you to store code on the cloud, developers can access and make changes to code easily – and they can also see changes made by others in real-time.
2) Version control. If you work with documents, you might have seen different versions of the same document in a single folder. It’s also likely that the file names of those different versions have become confusing, with names such as “Final Version,” “Final Version 1.0”, and “Final Version 1.2.3” adding to the clutter. GitHub saves the code as it is being written and you can see previous versions of the same code. This comes in handy when a change that you implemented in the code today resulted in certain features not working – all you have to do is revert to the earlier version and start all over again.