Source Control Management

This is one of those “I keep doing this and it hurts each time and there’s never a good concise resource that explains it well so I’m writing one” posts. Yes, yes, I know it’s easy – if you have Ruby installed. Or you’re living in a *nix world. Or you have a reasonable understanding of Git. Or you get pleasure from pain. However, if you’re living on Windows and you just want to get the damn thing done, it can be painful. I keep setting up new machines and having to remember how to do this from...

Last week, with the help of the good folks at Red Gate, I set up a little competition to give away 5 licenses [https://www.troyhunt.com/2012/09/life-without-source-control-share-your.html] of their very excellent SQL Source Control [http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-source-control/] product. The entry criteria was simple – share your most painful experience which could have been avoided by using source control. Many painful stories emerged but I thought it worth sharing and c...

Back around the turn of the millennium and during the final heights of the dot com boom, I found myself in London building the UX for the brand new online-only cahoot bank [http://www.cahoot.co.uk/]. (I then realised the miserable weather I was enduring was, in fact, summer and hastily returned to a balmy Aussie winter. But I digress.) As with most things dot com, days regularly stretched into nights and frequently consisted of copious amounts of both caffeine and beer. Mistakes were made. The...

Ah source control, if there’s a more essential tool which indiscriminately spans programming languages without favour, I’m yet to see it. It’s an essential component of how so many of us work; the lifeblood of many development teams, if you like. So why do we often get it so wrong? Why are some of the really core, fundamentals of version control systems often so poorly understood? I boil it down to 10 practices – or “commandments” if you like – which often break down or are not properly underst...