Prior to my current job, I never really did any "serious" programming. I had a few web sites, some tools and such I created for myself at home, and so on. The biggest team I worked on for a serious project was two people strong–myself and a good friend of mine. I’ve never really had to worry about version control or multiple people working on code at the same time.

Fast forward to my current job. I still don’t work with a huge team of developers, so I don’t have to worry about people editing my code at the same time as myself. However, I do have to maintain fairly large codebases–one in particular. This brings me to the title of my post: how come no one told me about Git?

For those unaware, Git is a "free and open source, distributed version control system." I’ve been using Git a lot lately, and I have to say, it’s awesome. Easy to use and fairly easy to understand (some of it’s more obscure features requires a bit of reading), I’m even using it for projects that only I’m working on. Branching and merging/rebasing is so easy and fast, it’s cake to test out experimental features without worrying about your stable codebase. And keeping a customized open-source project up-to-date is simple. Just git pull changes into the stable branch, git checkout your custom branch, and git merge stable. I’ve even been able to integrate it with Bugzilla, so I can push patches directly from the command line to our issue tracking system.

Another awesome pseudo-feature of Git is the community around it. It’s easy to clone and fork projects with Git, and GitHub is the perfect tool for finding code and getting your own code out there. I’ve never really written any code to share with the open source world, but I’d really like to, or find a project where my (very limited) expertise would be helpful and contribute. I think Git and GitHub will be my doorway into that world.

If you’re curious about Git, check out "Why Git is Better Than X," an article that compares various version control systems.