Why use Git?

Just like it was helpful to understand how we built software before automation tools such as GitLab CI/CD pipelines came along (as discussed in Chapter 1), it’s helpful to know how teams coordinated the complicated process of making edits to the same files before Git or similar tools came along.

These tools are designed to solve many problems that developers face, but let’s look at just one. Imagine that you and your teammate Elizabeth are working on the same code base and both of you want to edit some of the same files. Furthermore, imagine that this is a time before the advent of Git or any other version control system (VCS). The only way to write software in this pre-Git era is for you to edit a file and then email it, put it on a shared network drive, or copy it to a portable disk. Then, you must let Elizabeth know that she’s free to edit it. She checks it out in some sense (maybe by adding an entry to a spreadsheet saying that she’s...