How I Stumbled Into Git, GitHub, and the World of Version Control

Stupid Michael. You had a working version of the game. Then you screwed it up with some new code and pressed the save button. Once you press save you can’t undo. Now you have to figure out what you did wrong just to get back to where you were. Now you have to do the most dreadful thing in the world: Rework!

I couldn’t let the above situation happen to me again. I needed a way to protect myself from myself. I needed a way to make progress and go back to an earlier point if an idea didn’t pan out. I needed a way to get access to my code from anywhere. I needed GitHub.

If you know about GitHub, you can read this post for entertainment purposes (particularly my ignorance of version control despite having used a subversion system before). If you don’t know about GitHub, you’re in for a treat.

GitHub is awesome. GitHub is the undo button on steroids Lance Armstrong and Ray Lewis wish they could’ve had in their primes. GitHub is online version of Git, an open-source version control system (VCS). In the same way you can track changes in a Word document, you can track changes across files and folders. Not only can you track the changes, but you can revert to earlier versions of files and folders. You can even make a change to a previous version of a group of files and folders (there really should be a word for them collectively aka repositories) and merge the changes into a newer version of the repository.

Crazy, right?

Anyhow, I just added the code for a game I’m working on to GitHub and it’s already paying off. I can work on each feature without fear of messing up the working code because I know I can just revert to the working version. It’s simplified my workflow and returned the freedom of thought I had previously lost to the limitations of the undo button.

Additionally, GitHub lets you create, collaborate, and contribute publicly. You can prove your valuable creative accomplishments and abilities instead of having to get some arbitrary credential. Besides, credentials, specifically academic ones, are suffering from inflation. Some people plan to fight this academic inflation by getting more degrees. A friend of mine has a brilliant professor who told his class “You should probably get your master’s degree because in a few years, your bachelor’s will be equivalent to a high school diploma.” Continuing to pay more into a system that can systematically stomp out creativity seems to be a losing proposition. I’ll let Sir Ken  Robinson expound…

I’d rather show off my cool, useful projects than sit through classes talking about what could work. GitHub lets me do just that.