Git — As explained to a 10 year old

For a long time when I was learning how to code, I was told to learn about Git. But every time I tried to go through a blog explaining about Git, all of them would just repeat the same things over and over again. Things like version control made no sense to a beginner like me back then. In this article, I’ll aim to explain Git in such simple terms that hopefully a beginner or even a person with absolute zero programming experience would be able to grasp it.

It’s commonly said that Git is a form of Version Control. But, what exactly is Version Control? And why use it? Well consider this:

You and a bunch of friends have made a car racing game and released it into the app store. Your game got a bunch of downloads and now you wish to add some more cars to the game to make it even cooler. In addition to this, your friends want to add more backgrounds/arenas in the game. So you decide that you and friend-1 will be working on the cars whereas the other friends will work on changing the backgrounds.

Here is where Git comes into play. Git helps to keep track of who has done what changes to the game. In addition to this, you don’t make changes directly to the game itself. You make a copy of the game, store it in your system and work on that branch to test if your game works correctly or not. If your game works nicely in your branch, you can then shift it into the main branch and allow the users to play with the new cars/arenas.

Consider that you have added a Toyota Supra car to your game and your friend-1 has added a Lamborghini. If you both had the same copy of the game, it would be impossible to add both cars to the game. Git makes it possible to add both of them (using features like merge conflicts, etc.) to the game. This way, you’re making sure that your game has no errors and more fun.

Say that you’ve updated your game and now you’re getting lots of good reviews. But, there seems to be a little issue. The newly added backgrounds/arenas of your game are glitching a lot and as a result, the game is crashing more than before.

With the help of version control, you can just revert to the previous version of the game while you work on fixing the issue. This can be achieved by simple git commands without keeping a separate backup of your game versions.

That’s it. That’s Git. Of course, it has more features and functionalities but this is all it does. It keeps a track of different versions of your program and the additions/deletions from each version to the next. With a bit of good git practice, it can also keep track of different programmer contributions. This makes it easier to catch bugs and fix them in no time.

If you wish to learn about more Git features, check this out. Thank you.