Git

Git is a distributed version control system created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds to support development of the Linux kernel. It tracks every change to a project's files and lets many developers work on the same codebase in parallel, then merge their changes without overwriting one another.

How Git works

At the core of Git is a local repository that stores the project's entire history. Work revolves around a few key concepts:

• Commit — a saved snapshot of changes with a message, author and unique identifier;
• Branch — an independent line of development where you can experiment without affecting the main code;
• Merge — combining changes from different branches into one coherent version;
• Remote — a hosted repository (for example on GitHub or GitLab) that you send changes to and pull changes from using push and pull.

"Distributed" means every developer keeps a full copy of the project's history on disk. This lets you work offline, and no central repository becomes a single point of failure.

Practical application

Git is today's industry standard for software development. Teams use it to develop features on separate branches, review code through pull requests, and maintain a clean change history that makes debugging and reverting mistakes far easier.

Beyond the code itself, Git ties into automation: pushing changes to a repository triggers CI/CD pipelines that build, test and deploy the application. The same idea underpins GitOps, where a Git repository becomes the single source of truth for the desired state of infrastructure. Fluency in Git is now a baseline skill for every developer and DevOps engineer.