Tools - Tag - In a past life… https://archive.jtimothyking.com/tags/tools/ Tools - Tag - In a past life… Hugo -- gohugo.ioen-usWed, 29 Apr 2020 17:15:38 +0000 Musings about Version Control (and other development tools) https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2020/04/29/musings-about-version-control-and-other-development-tools/ Wed, 29 Apr 2020 17:15:38 +0000 J. Timothy King https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2020/04/29/musings-about-version-control-and-other-development-tools/

Today, I had a conversation with a small company that doesn't use version control.

It's hard to remember what it was like before version control. I know I did get started in a world without it. When I started in embedded development, we didn't have version control.

Before there was version control, I made versioned backups of my entire working directory.

Yikes. Dark ages.

]]> More Reasons to Avoid SourceSafe https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/01/02/more-reasons-to-avoid-sourcesafe/ Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:23:15 +0000 J. Timothy King https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/01/02/more-reasons-to-avoid-sourcesafe/ I’m helping out with a project I used to work on, one in an organization that uses SourceSafe to manage its source code. Fortunately, this time, I don’t have to deal with SourceSafe this time. All I have to do is to submit my diffs against a baseline, and someone else will have to deal with merging them into the repository.

On a more recent project, we’ve been using git. There’s no comparison. It’s pretty cool how git effortlessly handles situations that SourceSafe can’t even fathom. (Another good alternative is svn, but using svnmerge on all branches.)

]]> Top Eight Reasons to Abandon SourceSafe https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2006/08/09/top-eight-reasons-to-abandon-sourcesafe/ Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:03:59 +0000 J. Timothy King https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2006/08/09/top-eight-reasons-to-abandon-sourcesafe/ How many of us work in Microsoft shops? I’m ashamed to admit that I do. When I took the job, I thought the benefits of working in a new domain with new technologies would outweigh the fact that I had to use Microsoft tools and program for Windows. Well, the benefits are real. The costs are also real. And one of these costs is SourceSafe.

The worst part about it is that there’s no particularly good reason why we have to use SourceSafe.

]]> When the Best Tool Isn't, and Why a Growing Team Doesn't Care https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2006/08/02/when-the-best-tool-isnt-and-why-a-growing-team-doesnt-care/ Wed, 02 Aug 2006 16:00:55 +0000 J. Timothy King https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2006/08/02/when-the-best-tool-isnt-and-why-a-growing-team-doesnt-care/ Kathy Sierra excellent post on When the “best tool for the job”… isn’t misses an important point. It’s not that she missed the point so much as she just didn’t go into it. But I think it deserves going into.

Many software developers become very attached to their favorite programming languages, methodologies, practices, and so forth. Checking the link-backs for my post “Twelve Benefits of Writing Unit Tests First” demonstrates this. One commenter on another blog even said he saw no value in reading the whole post, since it was specious and had no redeeming value. I took great joy in that comment, because it means I must be doing something right to push someone’s righteous buttons so accurately. Regardless, would test-first be the right tool for that programmer?

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