Lesson 1 · Git & How We Branch
What git is, and why a team can't live without it
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Learn · 4 min

Git is a version control system: it records the full history of every file as a series of snapshots called commits, so nothing is ever truly lost and every change has an author and a reason. For a robotics team this matters for three concrete reasons.

  • You never lose work - if today's drive-tuning change makes the robot worse, yesterday's exact state is one command away.
  • Many people work in parallel - one person tunes the hood while another rewrites an auto, each on their own copy, and git merges the results.
  • Review happens before code reaches the robot - changes are proposed, read by a teammate, then merged, instead of being typed live onto the robot at a competition.

Our project lives at github.com/team-7558/bot-2026. GitHub is the website that hosts the shared copy; git is the tool on your laptop that talks to it. Throughout this lesson, 'the repo' means that one shared bot-2026 project.