3 Reasons You Should Use Source Control


  • Share on Pinterest

Everyone should use source control, I don't care what the size or complexity of the project is. I don't care how many people are working on it, one or one hundred. Use source control, I'll tell you why.

First, there is no excuse not to, nearly all IDE's and a lot of the programming editors now support some form of source control. The set-up process is almost painless these days.

Secondly, it is a great way to experiment with new features, major refactoring, and lots of ‘what if I just make this massive code base change' without having to create lots of copies of the project. By using branches you can take your work in a whole new direction and always step right back to a working copy. This proved extremely useful when I was learning some CoreData techniques on my 100 days of code project, I re-wrote the coreData code multiple times to find the one I was most comfortable with whist at the same time retaining a fully working version should I need it at any stage.

Thirdly, disaster recovery and remote location backups. I do not feel I need to explain this one too much, simply said, a disaster of a lost drive, fire, theft, or stupidly deleting a project can happen. This is a great way to keep a copy off site in a remote repository somewhere. There are now plenty of free source control hosting sites or paid ones should you be needing something more substantial. Personally, I like GitHub and BitBucket.

You owe it to all the hard work you put in to your applications to back it up. Plus, you can look back over the time line to see how well your coding skills have improved over time.

Other posts you might be interested in to help you learn Git

Create a gitIgnore file for Swift and Xcode development

How to use GitHub with Xcode

How to use Git branches