In this lesson, we will talk about version control with Git and GitHub. Some of you might have already heard about it or even used it. Git is a very popular version control tool mostly used by developers but it can very well be applied to non-coding projects as well! You could use it to write a paper or to manage your dataset. If you do develop code, however, you should not live without Git or another version control system. There are several other version control systems such as Mercurial and SVN but Git is the most used in research. In the international research software engineer survey from 2022, Git was used by 93.75% of all survey respondents.

When creating a digital project it is important to know what underlying software, platforms, libraries, code, etc. we are utilizing. By keeping track of these elements we can make sure that our future work and that of researchers that build upon our efforts can execute our codes. But this can be a very time-consuming task especially when it is not built into the workflows that we may already use in our day-to-day practices. For this very reason, we can utilize containers that exist to help you standardize and be able to distribute your environments.