What is version control? (And why is it?) {

What is version control?

Version control is a way for us to track the entire history of a project over time.

We work in a folder called a repository that stores all our project’s files. Each time we make a significant change to our project, we commit that change to our project’s history using version control.

We end up with a timeline of our project that marks every single time we made a change to it, as well as what the changes were.

For example, here’s the version control repository (folder) for Pippin’s project Let’s Snake: Ancient Greek Punishment:

https://github.com/pippinbarr/lets-snake-ancient-greek-punishment/

And perhaps most importantly, here is the “commit history” of that project:

https://github.com/pippinbarr/lets-snake-ancient-greek-punishment/commits/master/

You can see that each time the project was changed in a significant way, there is a timestamp, a message, and a record of exactly what was changed in it.

So you can see that on the 3rd of June, 2022 Pippin “Fixed the weird event delay in ticks”!

And why is it?

By using version control we can:

• View the history of our project laid out with timestamps and descriptions of the work done at each step
• Revert our project to a previous state if we made some huge mistake
• Collaborate with others on the same project far more easily
• Easily work on our project on different systems by just downloading the project repository where we need it
• Meet industry standards for software development, since pretty much any serious programming job will involve version control

In short, version control is pretty great and pretty important.

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