How I Came to Appreciate GitHub

I didn’t meet GitHub early in my career. I met it the way you meet certain foods—slowly, suspiciously, and only after years of looking for something better.

Back when I was at Boost eLearning, I was the entire documentation department. Writer, reviewer, publisher, accidental designer. Everything lived in Google Docs, and—because it was just me—it worked. Looking back, it was almost idyllic: one person, one voice, one pile of drafts stacked neatly inside a single brain. My only argument about version control was with myself.

Eventually, I brought in one more person to help. The two of us shared a single Google Drive folder like it was a fragile little houseplant. We were careful. We named things properly. We didn’t duplicate files for no reason. And because it was just the two of us, Google Docs still felt… fine. Not perfect, but manageable—like cooking dinner in a small kitchen. You bump into each other sometimes, but the meal still gets made.

Then I came to Salesforce, where the documentation scale is… different.

Suddenly I was working with large teams, multiple product lines, and more SMEs than I could count. All of us were using Google Docs the same way people use duct tape to fix a leaky pipe: with optimism, denial, and an unreasonable amount of faith.

And that’s when the chaos began.

Google Docs was no longer a neat little folder. It was a frontier town. Files multiplied on their own. Folder structures grew sideways. Someone created a “final” version, and then three more “actual final” versions appeared overnight. And trying to keep track of SME permissions? That was a sport. A whole Olympic event.

I remember those days vividly:
Switching files from edit to comment access.
Spot-checking permissions like a security guard at a mall.
Catching a stray SME who had—despite all precautions—gone in and quietly “fixed” the text for me.
Jumping in and saying, “Hey, quick reminder—please use comment mode!”
Again.
And again.
And again.

It was a constant game of whack-a-mole. A deeply human game, actually. Everyone working with the best intentions, everyone accidentally overwriting each other anyway. It didn’t matter how well organized or disciplined the team was. At scale, Google Docs simply couldn’t keep up.

Because Google Docs gives you real-time editing, but what documentation teams really need is something else entirely:

• Accountability
• History
• Parallel workspaces
• Safety nets
• A single source of truth that isn’t constantly shifting under your feet

At some point—and every doc writer reaches this moment—I realized that there was no amount of folder re-labeling, access auditing, or “please comment only” reminders that could make documentation at scale sustainable inside Google Docs.

It wasn’t a failure of discipline.
Or a failure of process.
It was a failure of the tool.

And that’s when I finally met GitHub.

Not all at once. Not with fireworks. More like discovering a new room in your house—a room that had been there the whole time, but you never stepped into it because the door looked intimidating.

GitHub felt different immediately.

Branches instead of duplicate files.
Commits instead of “filename-COPYLOCK”.
Pull requests instead of “Can someone review this when you have a minute?”
A clean history instead of dozens of comments saying “resolved,” “resolving,” “oops, unresolved,” and “see thread above.”

Suddenly I wasn’t babysitting documents.
I wasn’t patrolling access settings.
I wasn’t rebuilding paragraphs someone deleted accidentally.
The work finally behaved the way documentation deserves to behave—with structure and respect.

And here’s the strange part:
People sometimes talk about GitHub like it’s “for developers.”
But writing and shipping documentation with GitHub feels—at least to me—more humane than any shared document ever did.

Writers get privacy to think.
Reviewers get clarity.
SMEs get visibility without editing powers.
And teams, as a whole, get something rare: stability.

Looking back, I think that’s what I craved all along. Not just a place to store files, but a way to work that didn’t collapse the moment more than two people touched it.

I still use Google Docs for brainstorming, quick notes, collaborative scribbles—the messy, creative part of writing. But for documentation?
For the real, published, user-facing, business-critical stuff?

GitHub is the first tool I’ve used that’s actually built for the job.