Git for scientists, an introduction

Version Control Systems (VCS) track the history of changes in any set of files, allowing to go back to any version, analyse changes between two dates and even to merge changes done by different authors. VCS are used mainly in the software industry, because they are specially useful to control changes over text files, like the source code of a program. However, one does not have to be a programmer to use this kind of software, nor they are useful just for professional source code. Write documents or scripts, cleanup data or work collaboratively in a decentralized way, are common tasks on science where the version control turns a very valuable tool. Git is the most popular and powerful version control system available today. In this talk we'll see its key concepts, the typical usage "flow" and day-to-day commands, and an overview to many related services like Github, Zenodo, Overleaf and more.