Introduction
Collaborative version control, with git and GitHub, is the coders’ Big Little Secret. It offers a set of tools and approaches to working securely, safely and collaboratively with others (including one’s past self) on complex projects that is potentially very transferrable to almost any kind of knowledge work that involves writing stuff down. (So, pretty much anything office-based.) Not just transferrable to other kinds of knowledge work, but potentially transformative.
The git/GitHub collaborative version control pattern isn’t coders’ Big Little Secret because coders want it to be a secret, however. Instead, it’s because collaborative version control, through git and GitHub, is fundamentally weird, inherently arcane, unintuitive, difficult to ‘grok’.
For years, I’ve been trying to work out some more intuitive ways to explain git/GitHub. And now, below, with the embarassingly sizeable help of Claude Sonnet 4.5, I think I might have it: Git/GitHub as rock climbing.
(If you’d prefer, you can view the example directly too)
Enjoy