Problems faced by developers before version control

A typical way to store your code would be to use a pen drive to store as well as share the code but there are few restrictions which came with it

Problem - 1 :-

If the other person makes changes, there is no way to track what was modified.

Problem - 2 :-

If there is a bug and the other party fixes it, we won’t know exactly what changes were made. Going back and forth to compare changes is not practical, and the same tracking issue occurs.

Problem - 3 :-

If one person is making changes to the code, the other person will not have access to those updates. Even if the other person has a copy, they cannot make changes to the production code without causing the code base to go out of sync.

A visual representation to understand the problem

Just looking at the above visual representation you can guess that it would be a big mess and here I have only taken example of 2 people now imagine more then 2 ….. yes guessed it right a big mess

Enough with the problems now lets talk about the solutions

Now lets say a solution would be to have something CENTRAL which can be used by all parties, like something on the cloud – a single source of truth. Until now it was a pen drive now we need a server as the source of truth where everyone can be connected.

Why ?

1. It keeps track of your code

2. It keeps track of who made the changes

3. Basically, full history, and you can revert back any change.

It solves the major problems of collaboration and also provides backup

All above mentioned thing is done by GIT and the server which runs it is GIT HUB

• So GITHUB is a server which hosts GIT.

Similarly, one can get their own server and install GIT on it.

So, GIT is a tracker – the actual version control system – basically tracking who did what. VCS (Version Control System)

The idea here is - Each dev has Git locally, then syncs with GitHub server