Working in teams is an essential skill for any software engineer. Many jobs and projects a programmer will work on in their career will require some sort of teamwork or collaboration. Modern programs, such as operating systems or database management software, are so complex that a single person would require years to decades to finish one polished and working application, even if that person is an outstanding coder. That is the reason teamwork and collaboration is such a necessity for the modern programmer.
In recent years there have been programs/software that have been created to help coders better collaborate with other coders on bigger and bigger projects. Smarter messaging applications like Slack or Asana, to mention just a few out there, that really helps a team communicate clearly with one another. There are also great configuration management applications like Git, again only mentioning one of many, that help a teams of coders efficiently create a large and complex program. For a better understanding of what Configuration Management is all about you can read about it in CMU’s site. Presently cloud-based software hosting platforms are available for teams or individual coders that can hold a vast amount of data/code, the most popular being Github.
I’ve been using Git and Github for a little over a year now and I feel that it’s helped me most with coding in a team. What I mean is I am more comfortable working alone and through Git/Github I am better able to write code that integrates well with other coders on a shared project. The branch and master aspects of repositories in Github are amazing. The idea that I can work by myself on a given task and have it public for the rest of the team, giving them the opportunity to give advice on what can be improved. Another great feature of the branch/master repositories is the fact that the original code a team of programmers is working on is never changed unless the owner of the repository permits it. That means the team can perform test after test to verify that updates and changes to the code are working without bugs.
In regards to the popularity of either Git or Github and which application had been the reason for the other’s popularity rising, in my experience, I started working with Github before using the command line to push and add commits through Git.