As part of the professional skills training, Dr Ian Hawke started the series of workshops by introducing the Git version control system. Git has become the de-facto standard in version control, and the NGCM doctoral students are introduced to it on the very first day in semester 1 of their first year — the use of version control tools is beneficial throughout the training programme and all research activity.
Version control tools help to keep (time series of) backups, track progress, allow to identify where a bug was introduced and to assist in undoing this and are key to reproducible science.
The introduction to version control with Git at this point is part of a series of workshops that also enable the students to collectively create web pages and contribute to this blog, and to share their contributions via pull requests – as is common practice for open source projects.
Posted by Hans Fangohr