Hadley Wickham presents and demonstrates how understanding git & github will give you two data science superpowers. This is done through:
Collaboration: With git and github, you can easily work with others. You no longer have to email files back and forth, or fight over who’s editing which file in dropbox. Instead, you can work independently, and trust git to combine (aka merge) your work.
Time travel: git allows you to back in time to before you made that horrific mistake. You can replay history to see exactly what you did, and track a bug back to the moment of its creation. Git even allows you to do the code equivalent of travelling back in time to kill your own grandfather!
Hadley is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (like the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr)and principled software development (e.g. roxygen2, testthat, and pkgdown). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science.
