0. What is GitHub and How We Use It

Author: Brandon Rice

If you scroll down to the very bottom of this page and click on the link, About, GitHub explains that it holds a community of 50 million members as of August 2019. So why are all these people using GitHub?

GitHub is a website that allows users to view Git repositories!

For users not using a version control platform, if anything happens to the computer that has their work saved on its hard drive and the data is lost, hundreds of hours of work could be lost! Git fixes that. Git, a version control program, allows users to save their work in individual project packages called repositories. These repositories are hosted on a server, in our case "in the cloud", so if anything happens to the local version, anyone with access to the repository can recover it. Another benefit to version control, as the name suggests, is the ability to revert back to an older version of your work.

These Git repositories can be viewed from a command line or terminal (text based), but GitHub allows all the information (files, folder structure, etc.) to be graphically viewed!

More information on how to use Git and GitHub to back up your code can be found in the video tutorials on the page: 3. ROS (C++) With Git From The Ground Up Tutorial Series

SDRC uses GitHub for more than viewing Git repositories!

Our SDRC software team also uses GitHub to track our progress, problems, and ideas for the code. At the top of any page in the repository urc-code, you will find a tab called Issues. Any time anyone on our team finds a new problem, bug, or something that needs to be coded but hasn't yet, they will create a new issue. Then, members can volunteer (or be voluntold) to fix the issue. Each issue will also be tracked to certain date milestones to make sure we stay on track!