King & McGaw Developers

Source control is fairly commonplace these days. Most people use the likes of GIT or SVN as part of their process, however there are still plenty of people out there who don’t use version control because they either don’t see a reason to or they don’t know where to start.

Until mid-way through last year, I fell into the latter category. I worked alone as a freelancer and made good use of Dropbox. The thing is, I was really missing out. It wasn’t until I started working as part of a team that I saw the real benefits.

I had tried to used these tools a few times, but quickly became overwhelmed by the magnitude of documentation that was presented to me. It all seemed to complicated and still, I couldn’t understand how I would benefit from this extra step in my workflow.

The thing is, once someone sat down with me and took me through what I needed to know about these systems, it almost became second nature. I have now got experience using both SVN and GIT and would highly recommend GIT over SVN to anyone, especially with the use of Github.

These days, particularly if you use a Mac (which I assume most developers do), there are some great, simple user interfaces for both GIT and SVN which will help you to get started and give you an understanding as to how these technologies work. Once you understand this, its really easy to learn the terminal commands.

The apps I would recommend are Versions for SVN and Github:Mac for GIT. Both are relatively self-explanatory but also have good documentation available.

Stick with it and you will wonder how you ever worked without this stuff. Personally, I would never start a project without using GIT now, even when working solo.