What is Git?
Git is a directory content tracker (i.e. it lets you keep track of the contacts of directories as they change over time). It was developed originally by Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) in 2005.

What do we use it for?
Until a couple of weeks ago, we were using Subversion for keeping track of our source code. We’re now about a third of the way into converting everything to git (a surprisingly straightforward process, thanks to the git-svn utility).

So git is our source code manager of preference these days. Whenever someone makes a change to one of our applications or dependencies, they check the change into the central repository via git, and the other developers can then merge those changes into their own repositories. Git makes much of this insanely easy, compared to Subversion.

Why do we like it?
Branching and merging are the features we originally fell in love with. Whenever we start development on a new feature, we create a “branch” of the code. Work done in this branch will not affect the “main” branch (called “trunk” in subversion, and “master” in git), so it is a good way to make significant changes without affecting what our users actually see.

Branching and merging in Subversion are painful. If you’ve never used it, you don’t know what I mean. If you have, you do. Branching and merging in git, though, are wonderfully, blissfully straightforward. For those two reasons alone git is worth the switch for us, though there are lots of other, more advanced, features we like about git, too (git-stash, git-bisect, etc.)

How can people learn more?
The learning curve is pretty hefty, especially if you start out thinking of it like “subversion-but-with-some-differences”. The best way to learn git is to forget everything you know about more traditional SCM’s and read through the various tutorials online. We’ve got a Backpack page where we’ve been accumulating various Git resources.

Once you’re over the hump, though, it’s pretty amazing how easy it makes some tasks that are really hard in other systems.