Introducing Git

The kitchen drawer is where all the things are thrown so that you know where they are. Finding them again is strangely difficult. In software development you need better than the kitchen drawer to keep work organised.

Git is a revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds. it is capable of distributed working with the ability to support collaboration between multiple developers and teams. It is lightweight, robust, widely used and supported and, perhaps most important, open source and free.

You are most likely to come across git when pointed towards a repository stored on Github. Git can seem complex and mysterious but even beginners can get going quickly with just a few basic commands. Better yet, Visual Studio Code makes it easy to integrate git into project development. With VS Code you can use both command-line and GUI tools to maintain git repositories.

Sure, a little investment in time is needed to get started but the dividends are huge.

In this month’s talk, Peter Harrison look at the basic use of git and github from both the command line and within VS Code to perform some simple maintenance on an Arduino library.