Version control

- A lot of people have a misconception about developers. That we're all a bunch of loners, working in our rooms, on the next big Facebook or Google. In reality, most developers work as part of a team. To create high performing teams, developers make use of formalized processes and version control. One of these processes, Agile, focuses on producing working software and regrouping regularly to make sure that what you're doing aligns to customer needs. Now it works by scheduling a series of sprints where you build, test, and replan your work every few weeks. That's a big improvement from a waterfall approach, where all the planning is done at the beginning and takes most of the time. You may also hear about something called DevOps. It combines software development, the dev part, with operations, or ops. The goal is to shorten the time between writing the code and deployment. Whereas Agile focuses more on the communication between consumers and the product, DevOps focuses on how that software is deployed in the current environment. Today more software is being developed within a processes called Continuous Delivery. Many development teams are constantly shipping new features to existing software. The software goes through continuous testing, monitoring, and analyzing the success of the code. Good software should also be well documented so that other developers can understand your code. And honestly, sometimes, so that a future version of yourself can understand it too. If many people are working on the same piece of software at the same time, how do you manage and combine those changes to make a new version of the software? Now one of the most popular ways to manage software on the web is Git, which allows people to work on their own versions of projects and then merge changes together, identifying potential conflicts and providing a way to resolve them. This is typically referred to as Version Control. Now a good developer needs to be comfortable with not just how to code, but also the process of how software is made.