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What's version control and Github?

A better way to save progress than Powerpoint.

Foundationaldevops

Last updated: March 3, 2025

The TL;DR

Version control lets you track and manage changes to your code in a more sophisticated way than you’re used to. 

  • Code changes a lot, so keeping history is critical, especially when multiple people are working on a project together

  • Version control tracks changes to a codebase and regulates how people can make updates

  • Git is the standard protocol for version control and almost every developer uses it

  • Github provides a managed hosting service for your code repositories

Your company’s applications and internal tools all use version control, and without it, nobody would be able to get any work done. So read this.

Terms Mentioned

What’s version control?

The easiest way to understand version control is to look at how you version control your stuff. Let’s imagine you’re building a Very Important Presentation for your Managing Director. What’s your workflow? 

  • Make change to a slide (Move Very Important Box 1px To The Left)

  • Save changes

  • Make other changes

  • Save those changes

What happens if you want to go back to a previous version, because you made a bad change, or your MD told you to scrap all of the stuff he just told you to do? You have a couple of pretty weak options:

  • Undo (Command Z) – this only works for relatively recent stuff, you have to do it one by one, you lose everything that you’ve built since then, etc.

  • Save files in versions (presentation_final_1, presentation_final_2) – takes a lot of time, unclear progress, and very inefficient

Version control exists to solve this exact problem. Instead of just saving and losing all of your previous progress, version control makes you commit your changes as new versions while still keeping the old ones: and you can go back to any commit at any point in time. It’s basically as if you saved every group of changes as a new file separately (like option #2 above), but in a much simpler, more efficient way. 

saving changes powerpoint

Version control is really popular in software engineering, but not in business contexts: that’s because all of those problems we talked about are way worse when you’re developing an application. Modern applications can have tens of thousands of lines of code (often way more), all dependent on each other, and being worked on by multiple people. Imagine building a presentation with 10,000 slides and 30 other analysts. Actually, don’t. I care about you.

This is all a little abstract: let’s dive into Git, the most popular actual version control software, and see how it works in practice.

Git and basic concepts

Git is the piece of software that developers actually use to version control their code. It was originally released in 2005 by Linus Torvalds (the same dude who built Linux ), but has basically become the ...