GitHub

First founded on February 29, 2008, and released to the public on April 10, 2008, GitHub is a web- and cloud-based platform that has become the world’s largest software development and source code platform. Its unique-sounding name comes from the fact that it is built upon Git, a version control system that tracks changes to a system. It is a go-to platform for many developers for storing, managing, and collaborating on software code. Many public projects are hosted on GitHub, allowing people to view, use, or contribute to them.

GitHub has several core features, all of which are vital to its success. Its most prominent feature is its repositories, or repos, where code is hosted and saved along with its history. When code is first created in a source code editor like VS Code, it can be sent to a repository through a commit, which saves the changes to the repository. When several people need to work on a repository, branches can be used. A branch allows a user to work on code without interfering with the main code. If those branch changes need to be added to the main code, a Pull Request can be submitted, allowing teammates to review the changes and decide whether they should be incorporated into the main code. As someone who uses GitHub, I can personally attest to how useful it is to developers and how vital it has become to web development.