There are tools that work as time machines for the generated source code, allowing keep track of changes since older versions. It is also possible to detect and merge changes in the same files, as well as identify code conflicts automatically.
These tools are called version control systems.
In version control systems there is a repository that allows us to get any existing version of the code. Whenever we want to control the versions of some file, we have to say that we want to track it in the repository. With each change that we want to implement, we must store the changes in this repository.
CVS, ClearCase, SourceSafe and SVN are some of the versioning systems that have been around since the 90's. In the mid-2000s, more modern, faster, and more reliable version control systems such as Mercurial, Bazaar, and Git emerged.
Git is an extremely fast and competent version control system. It was created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the same creator of the Linux kernel. Nowadays, in addition to the Linux kernel, the tool is used in several other open source projects. Git is also used worldwide by companies.
In 2008, GitHub was created, a web application that makes it possible to host Git repositories, in addition to serving as a social network for programmers. Several open source projects are hosted on GitHub like jQuery, Python, Node, Ruby and many others.
In Part 2 we'll get started with version control with Git.