Comments on: “You Must Hate Version Control Systems”

By: Bill Rose

Bill Rose — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:41:40 +0000

I work as a web developer /programmer at a British university. We are regarded as cutting-edge in the HE development community. The other devs and I begged and pleaded for proper version control after the big boss “took agin” SVN after a 5-minute experience with an unfinished/misconfigured SVN server, when he was able to download code he thought he shouldn’t be able to see.

The big boss then created a shared folder “code repository” and said “this’ll do ’til we can get Team Foundation Server!” at which point I vomited into my wastebin for several minutes.

Eventually, we got a verbal commitment to use Git as the departmental VCS. However, big boss wasn’t too happy about Git bare repositories (which were the only way to use Git properly on our cloud shared folder product) as he wanted to be able to read and make changes to the code. In other words he didn’t mind me and the other devs using Git but didn’t want to engage himself. He just wanted to make any changes he wanted, potentially release code and then let us crowbar that back into our version management strategy / method afterwards.

He didn’t mind there being a single-user repository on the cloud shared folder, but that doesn’t scale to more than one person.

His bedroom hobbyist approach to coding is a bit of a nightmare. OK it’s his train set but I’d really like to see some proper software development best practices round here. We’ve finally hired a CI specialist to a senior position who has cool Jenkins experience though so maybe we’ve done it.

Still might have to use evil TFS though. Microsoft are a bunch of corporate buccaneers who’ve spent decades raping the industry. Can’t they just f. off? Still, at least they added Git compatibility to Visual Studio 2012. I refuse to say that that’s “cool” – Microsoft ache to be cool, and I think their striving is pathetic – but it makes them a modiucm less evil.

I’d still happily nationalise / open source the lot and cut all the heads off the Microsoft hydra, but Git’ll do for now.

By: Anon

Anon — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:04:02 +0000

I guess when you make a piece of crap like pipeline with no understanding of what you’re doing, you don’t really need source control.

By: Charles Ellis

Charles Ellis — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:19:14 +0000

By your own admission the pipelines system that you use is basically unique to you — it even includes some new programming paradigms like “atmospheric programming”.
Do you ever worry that hiring a university student to work with you will be bad for them in the long run? They may get much more experience than in other gigs that they’re capable of attaining, but all that experience is only applicable to your business.
While it doesn’t impact your bottom line much at all, once that student goes on to work at a different company, they might find themselves completely incapable of performing their job because the whole process is so different from what they learned at your shop.

By: Week Notes 11 & 12 | Davblog

Week Notes 11 & 12 | Davblog — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 07:54:25 +0000

[...] written Nothing here, but there was a post on my Perl blog which has attracted a pretty impressive number of comments. And a few more stories [...]

By: Bryan S. Katz

Bryan S. Katz — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:07:47 +0000

I think you’ll notice, if you read it a second time, that the salary is 20K – 40K, not 20K. you’ll also notice that the hours are flexible.

given that there are two universities within a ten minute cycle, students working at their convenience part time making 20K is well above most other opportunities available to them.

And Chisel is correct. I’m not looking for a senior programmer to design a platform. I’m looking for a junior programmer to use a platform and slowly learn how to improve that platform. For that programmer, it’s an opportunity to work on many more and many larger projects than they’ll ever get to do as a normal programmer at a normal programming job.

And if they really are available, or they choose to actually do good work from home, then the 40K puts them well into the green. For 25K in oshawa, their university and their house and their food is paid for the year, along with books and electricity and a car. Life may be a rip-off where you live, but in oshawa it’s not.

And besides, I think it’s clear that I’m not trying to attract you.

By: Bryan S. Katz

Bryan S. Katz — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:01:04 +0000

google and bing don’t need sitemap updates if your sites are built properly. my clients’ sites tend to get crawled a few hundred times each and every day. and all without my worrying about a sitemap. pretty neat huh?

By: Bryan S. Katz

Bryan S. Katz — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:59:36 +0000

When I said global, I meant the concept not the scope. all of the pipelines data is stored within the global variable $oPipelines. inside are templates, session stuff, human stuff, and everything. so that massive resetter function you mentioned is simply undefl-ing a few hash keys. actually, some of those hash keys will be written to a file for quick retrieval — like for the current human, who’s likely to show up again soon.

actually, persisting global variables is exactly the reason that I want fast cgi, it’s actually the only reason.

so the entire upgrade is spec’d out, has been for a year. as soon as I have the excuse to spend the three days, it’ll get done.

By: Christian Walde

Christian Walde — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:43:22 +0000

A bit of a warning here: You say you budget three days for upgrading to FCGI. However earlier you said “Not only is everything global”. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but globals persist between FCGI requests, so you’re very likely to run into issues there and will probably have to rewrite pretty much everything that creates or accesses globals; OR create a massive resetter function that will need to capture every single global.

So, you’ll probably want to budget a lot more than three days.

By: Therac-25

Therac-25 — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:48:45 +0000

So, you make/host sites for people, and don’t do anything related to SEO for them? Not even basic sitemap updating to ensure Google and Bing know about their sites?

Wow.

By: Therac-25

Therac-25 — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:55:02 +0000

Yeah, Ontario’s minimum wage is $10.25, so a full 8 hours on 252 working days out of the year would be $20,664 at minimum wage.

I suppose if you’re aiming for the developers whose primary career options are Best Buy or Tim Hortons, it’s a good enough salary for that.