"It's immensely important that great poems be written, but it makes not a jot of difference who writes them." - Ezra Pound
Writers and coders strike me as similar. They learn and understand the backbone of language, they play with it, and they ultimately create and destroy on top of it. It comes as no surprise that some great Coders are also great writers (here's. some. examples).
But then, why aren't more writers on GitHub?
I don't mean tech bloggers. I mean the journalist who has dozens of back-and-forths with her editor. I mean the MFA who has re-written the same sentence twenty times. I mean the teenager who is writing the next Great American Novel. You know, Writers.
I don't know. I'm not a Writer and I'm not a Coder, but I write and I code. And GitHub seems immensely practical for both.
In college, my personal record for multiple versions of a manuscript was 22. Impressive, but there are solutions now. Google Docs and Dropbox have been revelations in solving the challenges of editing a document across different machines. Bloggging platforms also allow you to access and edit a post anywhere in the cloud.
Git surpasses both those services. Enter git commit -m 'my message' and git diff version1..version2 my_file. Diffs allows me to see the text differences between any two of my versions, and commits allow me to comment on the specific save. Now I know exactly what changed every time I hit Ctrl+S.