The Zeitgeist

About 2 years ago I decided that CVS was old and decrepit enough to be just too hard to use, too brittle and I decided to get with the times and migrate all my various source archives to what all the cool kids were using, Subversion, or “svn.” And for about 2 years it’s worked out pretty well. SVN is not quite as easy to use as CVS, it’s got a lot of different access modes and methods, and it doesn’t keep your files as a set of diffs; however lately I’ve run into little unexplainable problems that have not only eaten dozens of hours of development time, but made me even question the safety of SVN itself.

SVN seems, in my experience at least, to have problems with network check-ins. I run my SVN server in a machine in one of my co-lo racks; I do this so that if my house if blown away by a hurricane, my code will still be there, also so that I can access my code from the road when I travel, or even from Startbucks if I just want to get out of the house for the afternoon. Several times in the last few months I’ve run into situations where I have checked files into SVN only to find them 1/2 checked in, or to find a file reported as “damaged” only when I try to make a new branch of my code base. YiKeS!

Not amount of SVN ju-jit-su seems to reset these files or unlock them. I have been forced on several occasions to get a good working copy, and create a new SVN repository. Needless to say, this is a problem. So, what to do? I’ve updated my Subversion code to the latest stable version, all my clients are up to date (I usually use IntelliJ IDEA, and it’s client is up to date)… yet SVN is starting to scare me.

I know nothing about GiT or Mercurial (?) or any of these other new SCMs…. worth the effort? Or am I asking for more trouble and lost development time…?

I have often wondered how a lot of my friends who run startups manage to do it. They code all day and night, and somehow manage to hang out at parties and go to conferences. Part of it comes, for many of them, from being single. It’s a lot harder to do all that stuff if you’re married and have a family, but quite a few people I know somehow manage to pull it off…

Sadly, I am not one of them. I think that perhaps they have secretly cloned themselves and are having the clones do the grunt-work, and they’re out and about at the parties and conferences. Needless to say I am more than a little bit jealous of all the conferences that other people seem to get to flit off to with wild abandon. *sigh*

One of the hardest things about doing a 2 person startup is that there is just no time to spare anywhere; I am working 16 hrs/ day constantly on code, documentation, trying to line up business alliances, etc. Did I mention I have 2 kids? And a wife? and a dog? What I really need is a clone or two.

(…or a mess of VC cash.)

Oh, joy! Isn’t this fun! (hint: “no,” is the correct answer.)

Please pardon the detritus as I move old posts into the new word-press universe….