Git & GitHub

Learn how software changes are tracked, reviewed, and shared.

Why marketers should care

If you work in developer marketing, product marketing, or technical content, you'll hear engineers talk about repositories, branches, commits, and pull requests every day. Understanding these concepts helps you collaborate with engineering teams and better understand how software is built.

What is it?

Git is a version control system. It keeps track of changes to a project over time.

GitHub is a platform that hosts Git repositories and helps teams collaborate on software.

How I think about it

Git is like the Version History feature in Google Docs—you can see previous versions and restore them if needed.

GitHub is where that project lives so everyone on the team can work on it together.

Where you'll hear it

"Can you review my PR?"
"Push your branch."
"Merge it into main."
"I just committed the fix."

Common vocabulary

Repository — The home for a project and its history.
Branch — A separate timeline for making changes safely.
Commit — A saved snapshot of your work.
Pull Request (PR) — A request to merge one branch into another.
Diff — The changes between two versions.

Try it yourself

Goal

Learn the basic Git workflow by creating and merging a change.

Steps

Create a repository.
Create a branch.
Edit a file.
Commit your changes.
Open a Pull Request.
Review the diff.
Merge into main.

Expected outcome

You will understand how engineers safely make changes to software without breaking the main version.

How this fits into the bigger picture

Git and GitHub are usually the first stop in the software development lifecycle. Code is written, stored in GitHub, reviewed, and then deployed to servers where it becomes a running application.