Git & Markdown

Git

if you are reading this, you've probably heard of GitHub (opens in a new tab)
a super common misconception is that git (or GitHub) is just a website where you keep your code, but it is actually so much more than that
git is actually a tool for version control and GitHub is just the current most popular platform and pretty much defacto industry standard
- a close second to GitHub would be GitLab (opens in a new tab) and back in the day BitBucket (opens in a new tab) was huge
version control means that git keeps track of all incremental changes and the entire history of changes made to a project
git is great for collaborating on code. not only will you always be able to see who contributed what and when but if devs are working on the same things at the same time, it can show conflicts so devs don't step on each other's toes and overwrite their work
since it keeps track of history, if something goes wrong, you can revert or rollback to a previous version of the project
another important feature is the ability to split off branches, meaning you can work on a feature or squash bugs without affecting the main source of truth code until you are ready to merge in the new code
on top of version control and collaborating, git (or GitHub) definitely also is where you keep your code and and where you can deploy that code to cloud based hosting providers (like AWS, Azure, Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, etc.) and infrastructure as code tools
git has also become integral to DevOps practices like CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) which involves automatically integrating code changes from multiple contributors into a main repository, and automating testing. Continuous Deployment (CD) automates the delivery of code to various environments, leading up to production

Markdown

so markdown is a lightweight markup language, think of it as like "HTML Lite" or something. in fact, you can even use HTML in markdown files if you feel compelled
the reason I want to mention it here is because markdown is the standard for README in git repositories
markdown isn't exactly a programming language, its more used for documentation, notes, and instructions and that is exactly what README files are for
most decent git repositories have good README files that will tell you about the tech stack used in the project, how to run the project locally and whatever else the devs want to tell you about or showcase. check out this repo (opens in a new tab), its an open source template for enterprise projects. if you scroll down pased all the code, you will see the README.md file rendered with instructions, images, suggestions, etc and that is all markdown

3.14 Capstone Exercise 4.1 Git Setup