Version Control for Non Techies

A little history

Local version control

Many file copies & error prone

A little history

Central version control

Adds collaboration

Central server = single point of failure

A little history

Distributed version control

+ +

Provide Transparency & Accountability

FiveThirtyEight's data is available to all

You can inspect the Historical Senate Predictions Data yourself.

And re-apply their methodology

And make modifications

In doing so FiveThirtyEight has made themselves accountable!

GitLaw

• S.J.Res.19, a US bill example from OpenCongress.org
• TheLawFactory.fr, French counterpart based on

Solicit Collaboration

Twitter's Innovators Patent Agreement has been adopted by many tech companies.

Adoption required consensus.

Consensus required participation.

Version control allowed anyone to contribute.

More Collaboration

• Series Seed Preferred Stock, another legal document
• A collection of useful papers, books, and links for the refined programmer

Tools

• GitHub for Mac^*
• GitHub for Windows^*
• Git command line client
• ^* Requires a GitHub account. Recommended.

Setup

1. Install software
2. Open account
3. Setup defaults

Work Flow

1. Put under version control, aka. create a repository
2. Record a version
3. Make changes
4. Repeat from #2

Collaboration

1. Jane clones/forks Joe's repo
2. Jane changes in her copy
3. Jane asks Joe to pull & merge her changes
4. Joe accepts Jane's pull request and merges Jane's changes
5. Jane's changes are now available to all Joe's contributors