In this video, I want to walk you through a guide
on how to manage your application's code,
especially as a non-developer.
If you are a business owner or a founder
and you're building an application
or some sort of platform or SaaS product,
the odds are that you've probably shared your code
or the app's been shared with other developers,
maybe another company that you've hired
to work on your application.
And so through all of that,
sometimes the access can get lost
or the ownership of that code can actually get lost
in where it's being stored.
So in this video, I'm gonna show you
how to essentially take back that control
and how to essentially bring it under your own account.
So this is gonna be the non-developer's guide
to managing your application's code.
And first, I'm gonna start off going through a few keywords
and phrases that you wanna be familiar with.
Next, I'm gonna walk through
how you can actually take ownership of your code
and how to get it back
if it's already been shared with others.
And lastly, I'm gonna show you how to download
and view this code on your computer
and kind of give you an insight
as to what's happening with your application.
So before I get started,
I just wanna let you know that I have everything
that I'm gonna go through is on a blog post
on our website, Anovo.io.
And you can check this out.
It's kind of walks through all these pieces step-by-step.
So I'm gonna pull this up
just to kind of reference throughout,
but you can check it out on our website
if you want it kind of written in written form.
So a few phrases you wanna get familiar with
and a couple important terms, get repository.
So this is essentially just a folder in the cloud
that encompasses all of the files and folders
and everything that's needed for your application to run.
So typically the best practices are that you set this up,
everybody shares their code as a team,
and then that way you can kind of control
who's making changes, what those changes are.
And it essentially gives you this unlimited backup,
essentially, if you will, of your application.
So you can always jump back to a previous version.
You can track who changed what.
It just gives you a really good sense of control.
Now, one of the tools that are used for that
is called GitHub.
GitHub is just a service that essentially is a place
to host all of your Git repository.
So similar way that GoDaddy hosts,
you can buy a domain name through there,
GitHub, you can actually host your repository through GitHub.
So it's now owned by Microsoft, very secure, very safe.
It's just a great service.
It's probably one of the most popular ones out there.
So we'll show you how to set up an account here with this.
And then one of the terms we'll be using is the word commit.
So this is essentially just a developer words
for a change to the application's code.
So typically developers will work on the code
on their own computer.
They'll get it to where they solve the problem
or create that new feature,
and then they'll commit it or publish the change
to the repository.
So it's just basically taking what's on my computer
and pushing it up to the copy of the code
that's in the cloud in the repository.
And the last piece here is a Git Desktop Manager.
So most of the time developers are not using this,
but if you're not technical and you just want a simple way
to sort of track what's going on with the code,
this is a great little tool that will kind of give you
some insight into what's changing.
And I'll show you a couple of ways of how you can
kind of keep an eye on what's going on with your app.
So let's move on to the second stage here,
which is taking ownership of your code.
So like I said, if you've hired a contractor
or development team to work on your application,
then they may have initially set up the repository,
which makes them the owners of the code,
and then they are now sharing it with you
or not sharing it with you at all.
So you want to essentially take back that ownership
and then share it with your team or with your contractors
from there, but you want to kind of maintain ownership,
put you in the driver's seat of the repository,
and then you can go from there.
So the first thing you want to do is go and set up
a GitHub account.
So if you go over to github.com,
and I'll just kind of look at the pricing here.
Essentially, you can go and set up a free account.
And this is kind of new now that you can actually
have unlimited private repositories on a free account,
which is pretty fantastic.
There are other plans you can definitely scale
if your company grows and you have more people
that need to have access to this.
But on the free plan, you can invite collaborators to this.
So that's very, very helpful because that's what...
your developers or your team that you're going to want to bring in, you can essentially have
unlimited people there. So very, very cool. So you're going to want to create a new account.
And then I'm going to sign into my account and just show you kind of how we've got this
set up for one of our own applications. So by default, everything on GitHub is public. So
any public repositories are going to be listed out here. And you can go over to repositories,
you can kind of see all of the different repositories we have here. And again,
these are just basically a folder with all the files that you need to make up your application.
So if I click into one of our own internal projects, you can see here we've got folders,
we've got different files that make up this, you don't actually really have to know what all of
these do or how they all connect together. But it's just good to know that this is sort of the
folder where everything is housed. And a couple things you can do from the screen. One, if you go
to the code here, you can actually just download a zip file, and it'll create taking a complete
copy of this, this folder and just download it to your computer. So that's the simplest way to
get it. And then I'll show you some other ways of how you can kind of sync it. There's some tools
here with this GitHub desktop. And another tool that will essentially let you stay in sync because
the problem with downloading the file once is that as soon as the next person makes a change,
you all of a sudden you're out of sync. And so it's not necessarily a great practice to just
download that. So from here, you can download the code, you can kind of see changes that are being
made. And the last thing you can do on this screen that's important is go to the settings.
And then once you're in settings, you can go in and go to manage access. And this is where you can
actually manage access for your team. So you can come to this button over here, and you can actually
invite your own team members by name. And this will actually search all through GitHub and let
you find the user or the person that you're looking for. If you're working with developers
or development company, they're definitely going to have a GitHub account. This is kind of the go
to for most developers. And then you can also manage who has access and you can hit this
trashcan icon if you want to delete or remove that person's access. So this is where all the
access takes place. There's a lot of other screens here. But really, this is where you
should pay the most attention as far as who has access and who doesn't. So that is GitHub.
And so you want to create that account. And so like I said, if this is on another account,
you can actually request that your developers or the company you're working with can actually
transfer that ownership of that repository over to you. But you do have to have a GitHub account
first in order to do that. And then the last thing you want to do is just to invite those
developers back. So once you've got ownership, you can then invite them as a collaborator so
that you sort of maintain all the ownership there. This last step is just downloading a
copy of the code and keeping track of the code. So there's two Git applications that we can get.
There's GitHub, which we just looked at has their own desktop app. It is a little more complex. It's
very powerful, but it's a little more complex as far as I think there's an easier one. I actually
personally use Gitbox, which is just 15 bucks, I think, whereas the GitHub desktop is free.
And so what I'll do is I'll show you what this actually looks like. So we looked at the app
here. As Tribe Social, we looked at what it looks like from the browser. And then what I can do is
open up GitHub here. And you'll see that I've got all my different repositories listed out here.
The design kind of background for this is to kind of look a little bit like Apple
Mail. So if you use Apple Mail, they're trying to copy a lot of the same UI. So it's very familiar
looking. So you click into the repository you want, and then you can see all of the changes
in kind of a simplified form. And if you click into one of these, you can actually see what
files are changing. And it's very helpful if you want to just see that they're essentially
movements. If you're waiting for a change to happen, you're not seeing it, you want to know
what's going on. And you hear developers maybe not being responsive. This is a great thing,
you can kind of go in there and be like, have we made any changes? Are we pushing anything?
And best practices for this is, especially for our team, is we have our team commit daily so that
we don't end up with going for days or weeks where there's a copy on one developer's computer,
and it's not backed up anywhere, that computer gets dropped or stolen or whatever. And then
that whole, you know, all that works that's been done has, you know, isn't, you can't get it back.
So we have our team kind of end of each day,
just commit the changes they have.
And that lets us sort of track what's happening in the app.
So this is a great little tool.
Again, you don't really need to do much with it,
but it's just helpful to see that there's movement here.
And then when I go to my Finder,
I can actually open up that repository into a folder.
So if I go here and we open Tribe Social,
you'll see that this list of files
actually matches the list of files we have up here.
So very similar to Dropbox or Google Drive,
it's just taking what's up here
and just downloading it to your computer,
letting you work on it, make changes,
and then you can sort of publish those changes
with a commit through Gitbox.
So that's sort of the workflow there
that most developers are using.
I think that as a founder,
it's very helpful to have access to this
just because you'll sleep better at night
knowing that you have access
and you're sort of in control of your own applications.
You've probably invested a lot to get to this point.
It's definitely worth kind of taking ownership of that.
So definitely check out our blog post
if you want to see like the sort of details of all this.
And I'd be happy to answer any questions.
If you want to drop a comment under this video
or on our blog post, I'll be happy to answer any questions,
but I hope this was helpful.
And hopefully this will help you sleep better at night
knowing that you have ownership of your code
and you can keep moving forward,
sort of managing exactly what's going on
with your application.
Thanks for watching.
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