Version control and Git essentials

Software industry icon Joel Spolsky, who created Stack Overflow, wrote a famous blog back in the year 2000. One of his many influential posts included one titled The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. The post was designed to give software developers an easy assessment to rate any software development organization’s maturity level. He asked 12 questions, with one point per question. A good software development group should have a score of 11 or higher. The very first item on the list is the concern of this chapter: Do you use source control? If you are curious about the rest, there is a link to the blog post, as well as a reference to Mr. Spolsky’s book Joel on Software, in the Further reading section of this chapter.

Joel called it source control. I call it version control. The terms are interchangeable. I will call it version control in order to be consistent with the UI in PyCharm, which refers to the group of features we’...