in reply to Taking care of your tools

Three things:

Seriously. It doesn't matter whether you use cvs, subversion, or even something else. It's not only useful for going back to see edits, I find it has an unintended consequence: It enforces discipline and makes me *think* about what goes into that treasure-box and get marked with my name, my work, and my comments. (Versus just some random file laying in a directory somewhere...

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Re^2: Taking care of your tools
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Mar 11, 2005 at 14:16 UTC
    It's so funny you mention this. I literally just finished going back through a clearcase repository to do some forensic analysis on a change. The history goes back to before 2000. The changes I was looking for happened as early as November, 2001.

    Since there is very little developer documentation and nearly every person on the product back then has moved on, the source control and being able to diff various versions is the only way I can come up with a reason behind why certain changes were made.

    Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
    Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
    Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
    Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.

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      Which leads to another suggestion: Document your code; and don't be afraid to leverage whatever tools you can find to make it easier and thus encourage you to do it. (You'll thank yourself later!) For starters: learn POD; learn Doxygen (or similar); learn what Literate Programming is.
[reply]

In Section Meditations