Re^3: Revisioning systems and the lackof

Agreed. Sometimes the most rewarding roles are ones where you have to start from nothing (or worse) and recreate a sensible working environment.

What's worse than nothing? How about legacy systems that are impossible to support and maintain? If you have reasonable management, who realise there's something wrong (they usually won't know exactly what it is), and are prepared to put their trust in you as a domain expert, you can often work wonders for them in this situation.

Comment on Re^3: Revisioning systems and the lackof

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: Revisioning systems and the lackof by imp (Priest) on Oct 06, 2006 at 12:24 UTC
My last employer was like this. They had good people, but horrible practices that had become habit because of constant crunch-time. During my interview I discovered that they did not use revision control. I agreed to take the job after they said they were going to start using a RCS. Working there was a good experience for me as I was able to change a lot of their practices, and save the other developers future headaches. It felt good. Other areas that were changed were increased use of reusable modules, extensive unit tests, increased awareness of security issues (especially sql injection), some WWW::Mechanize web testing automation, application monitoring, a group wiki knowledgebase, and an introduction to pair programming. Since it is a perl shop I also encouraged them to take an active role at perlmonks, because my activity here has increased my perl knowledge tremendously. Providing the best answer you know to a problem can be very instructive, as it forces you to think through something that you "know", but might not know well enough to explain initially. And when others offer corrections or improvements to your answer you learn about the edge cases and internals.	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re^4: Revisioning systems and the lackof
by imp (Priest) on Oct 06, 2006 at 12:24 UTC

During my interview I discovered that they did not use revision control. I agreed to take the job after they said they were going to start using a RCS.

Working there was a good experience for me as I was able to change a lot of their practices, and save the other developers future headaches. It felt good.

Other areas that were changed were increased use of reusable modules, extensive unit tests, increased awareness of security issues (especially sql injection), some WWW::Mechanize web testing automation, application monitoring, a group wiki knowledgebase, and an introduction to pair programming.

Since it is a perl shop I also encouraged them to take an active role at perlmonks, because my activity here has increased my perl knowledge tremendously. Providing the best answer you know to a problem can be very instructive, as it forces you to think through something that you "know", but might not know well enough to explain initially. And when others offer corrections or improvements to your answer you learn about the edge cases and internals.

[reply]