GitHub

Three strengths

• A full change history. Git tracks changes to files, so work can be reviewed, compared and rolled back. 1
• Peer review built in. Pull requests let people check proposed code changes before they go in. 1
• Automated workflows. GitHub Actions can build, test and deploy code whenever something happens in the project. 2

What it is

Software is a large collection of files that many people change over time. Version control is the system that keeps track: it records who changed what and when, lets the team combine each person's work, and lets them go back to an earlier version if something goes wrong. Think of it as Track Changes for code. The tool most developers use for this is Git, which came out of the Linux community in 2005 after the free licence for the tool they'd been using was revoked, with speed, a simple design and a fully distributed model among its goals. 4

GitHub is the service built on top of Git. It's a platform that supports your entire software development process: it hosts projects, called repositories, in the cloud and adds planning and collaboration tools such as issues and pull requests. 1 A pull request is a proposal to change the code, which others can review and comment on before it's merged in. 1

Microsoft agreed to buy GitHub in June 2018 for $7.5 billion in stock, at a time when the site had more than 28 million developers. 3 Today it's very widely used: 81.1% of developers surveyed in 2025 said they use it. 5

The other half of the story is GitHub Actions, a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that lets you automate your build, test and deployment pipeline. 2 Continuous integration means each change is automatically built and tested as it comes in, and continuous delivery means the checked software can then be released without manual steps. Workflows can be set to run when an event happens in the repository, such as new code being pushed. 2

We choose it because it's where most developers already work, so any developer who picks up your project later will find it familiar. 5

How we use it

GitHub hosts our code, and GitHub Actions handles continuous integration and delivery for our web apps every time: each change is checked, then deployed. We host our Next.js apps on Vercel, and we build most of those apps in TypeScript with Next.js.

In Software Development, that means your updates are checked and released the same way each time, which supports the faster time to value our agile approach aims for. In Solution Architecture, it's part of the delivery workflow we design around. Where a client runs on Microsoft's own toolset, we work in Azure DevOps instead.

References

1. GitHub, "About GitHub and Git", GitHub Docs. https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/start-your-journey/about-github-and-git (accessed 28 October 2026)
2. GitHub, "Understanding GitHub Actions", GitHub Docs. https://docs.github.com/en/actions/get-started/understand-github-actions (accessed 28 October 2026)
3. Microsoft, "Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion", Microsoft News Center, 4 June 2018. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ (accessed 28 October 2026)
4. Scott Chacon and Ben Straub, "A Short History of Git", Pro Git, 2nd edition, git-scm.com. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-A-Short-History-of-Git (accessed 28 October 2026)
5. Stack Overflow, "2025 Developer Survey: Technology", survey.stackoverflow.co, 2025. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology (accessed 28 October 2026)