Code Collaboration History

Pull Requests Win

Most code collaboration today happens through pull requests. Developers collaborate on code in other ways such as pair programming but pull requests have become the primary tool. If your job involves writing code it's a safe bet that your code goes through a pull request before it is merged.

Coding without Collaboration

But it wasn't that long ago when pull requests didn't exist and developers merged their code without code reviews.

How did that work? Was it better or worse than a world with pull requests?

Context matters

As computers have evolved and gotten more powerful, so have the programming languages we use and so has the sophistication of the software we use.

A software product a decade ago didn't have as rich of a user interface or functionality as even the simplest apps of today.

Collaboration Not Needed

So it's not too surprising that the software world was productive without code reviews. The code was less complex and one developer could fully understand the whole feature.

Pull Request History

So how and when was the pull request invented?

Before we tackle that, we need to get a little history of git the most popular SCM today and upon which the pull request was created.

We'll take a look at the history of git in our next post.