In my ICS 212 class that I took this last semester, we were forced to become familiar with something called SCCS. Simply put, SCCS is one of the predecessors to Github. The only difference is that it’s Unix based and is significantly less powerful in terms of file size and distribution (it’s not a website that’s publicly accessible). The point of this is that even early programmers were aware of the need for “Configuration management.” This isn’t wholly relevant to this question but I do believe that people in this course will find this amusing. Every year, San Jose state holds the “Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.” The specifications of the contest are so hilarious that I implore everyone to look it up on their own. The point of this is that the website is an excellent example of a technical product that is poorly maintained. I swear that they only ever update this website when the year’s winners are announced. The site is hasn’t been modified visually for years and if you look at the winners of any specific year, you’ll notice that the picture aren’t even properly aligned. A “terrible beauty” if I do say so myself.
So how important is Github? Github, or at least the concept of Github seeing as how there are other popular sites like it like Bitbucket, is essential to any sort of team based work. In literature if you want to collaborate on a certain piece of work, one would probably need to physically meet with someone in order organise all of your stuff and merge it into one cohesive text. Git is the same, the only difference being that this collaboration occurs online and at potentially different times.