What Next?
Now that you have begun using Git I hope that you can see that it can be a really useful tool for researchers and programmers.
Consider using Git to version control your
- Papers
- Research proposals
- Course / website material
- Research outputs (graphs, datafiles)
- Scripts
- Lab notes
- Software projects
Remember the fact that everything public though - if it shouldn’t be in the public domain, ensure you make use of a private account for which you can specifically control access.
If you have a .ac.uk email address, you can apply for an academic github account that will give you 5 free private repos which you can use precisely for this purpose. To set up an academic account on GitHub, first associate an academic email address with your account and then request a GitHub Education discount.
You can also make your code on github citable - have a look here for more information.
As with all things, you will learn more about and become more comfortable with Git the more you use it. Taking a little pain now to add it to your workflow will give you a lot of benefit later on.
At the very least it will save you from losing some work if your computer hard disk fails.