For a software developer, an empty project can feel like a blank page does for a writer. There are several practical considerations, including: Where do I start? How will I add to my project as it grows? How do I organize my project so that others can contribute to it? There are no easy answers to these questions, but this lesson will provide some concrete ways to think about project organization.

If we are going to take the time to build computational tools for humanistic research, we want others to be able to reproduce our work. This can either be for the purposes of verification of our results or for applying the tools to new datasets/research questions. This desire for reproducibility is motivated by the following questions:

• Will others be able to run my code?
• Will others know that my code works and does what I say it does?
• Will others be able to adapt, modify and contribute to my code?

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.