If you just tuned in, I’m attempting to explain Git and GitHub to the layman. The previous post was all about Git. This one focuses on what GitHub actually does.
Part 2: GitHub
Okay, now we can move on to GitHub. Unlike writing a paper, software developers rarely write code all by themselves in a closet. Well, some do… but most of us collaborate on our software projects. GitHub provides a meeting place for software developers to collaborate around code and the different versions of that code. It stretches the analogy, but imagine that your paper with all the different snapshots you took along the way was available for other people not just to read, but to derive new papers from. You would always be credited as the original author, but everyone can create derivative works and if someone added a really nice abstract you could pull just that change back into your version of the paper. GitHub acts like a digital room where everyone hangs out to share their projects, ideas, and most importantly their code. The same way that Facebook provides a medium for people to hang out digitally and share status, photos, notes, etc –GitHub provides a medium for programmers to share code.
Code is a very abstract notion to people who don’t program for a living, and this is where I think the idea of writing a paper as an analogy for writing code is very helpful. Just as you could have written your paper in Spanish or French or English, code can be written in any number of languages. The primary purpose of code is to communicate something to a computer. You can think of it like writing an instruction manual. In 3rd grade, I remember, we did an activity where we had to explicitly write out the instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The teacher then took our written instructions and followed them to a tee. If you wrote “Take two pieces of bread”, she would literally tear off two very small pieces of bread to start making the sandwich. If you didn’t explain how to open the jelly jar, there would be no jelly on your sandwich. If you didn’t explicitly say that the jelly and peanut butter sides of the bread should be touching in the middle, you would get a sandwich with jelly and peanut butter on the outside. This is what it is like when you have to communicate with a computer. At the lowest level, computers are really dumb; they can only do what they are told, so your instructions (code) must tell the machine exactly what you want it to do.
As you can probably imagine, writing all this code can get very unwieldy. Not only because of the sheer amount of code that it takes to develop a complex system like the Android operating system, but because that code is written by a large number of programmers (think lots of people editing the same paper all at once). This is where GitHub really shines. GitHub provides the ability for developers to publish and share code, solicit collaboration from other programmers, gain reputation in the community and discover/contribute to other code projects of interest. In many ways it is a realization of the original intent of the internet. To throw out yet another metaphor, GitHub creates a framework for the evolutionary improvement of software in real time. Like the evolution of species, software is allowed to mutate and change over time creating new variants, symbiotic relationships (sometimes even parasitic ones!), and a dazzling array of constructs and programs. GitHub is like primordial soup in which all these software projects are interacting, growing and changing. And instead of eons, this all happens at the speed of the interwebs.
If you want to learn more about GitHub, you know where to go.
If things are still fuzzy, then all you need to know is that we run a web site…. And we sell these cute little creatures that are a cross between a cat and an octopus…
