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You're Not Using Source Control? Read This!
07 January 2013
Read moreLast week I wrote an email to a client who hasn't yet implemented source control, but who is thinking about it. It turned into rather a long email as I attempted to convey WAY too much information in one long email. After some twitter banter, I repackaged my thoughts into a whitepaper on Source Control entitled You're not using source control? Read This! (PDF, no registration needed).
The document goes on to talk about the available tools (git, Hg, SVN) and give a sales pitch for _why_ source control has benefits for an organisation. There are also some action points to follow to implement source control if you haven't already taken the leap, which I hope will help anyone looking to take that step - it's kind of awkward in this day and age to admit that your organisation doesn't have source control, but however this situation arose, hopefully this document wraps up my thoughts on how to find a good way out!
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We Don't Know Deployment: A 4-Step Remedy
18 April 2012
Read moreSomeone emailed me recently, having read my book and wanting some advice. Here's a snippet of his email:
So here's my problem.We dont know deployment. We work from same copy on one test server through ftp and then upload live on FTP.We have some small projects and some big collaborative projects.
We host all these projects on our local shared computer which we call test server.All guys take code from it and return it there. We show our work to clients on that machine and then upload that work to live ftp.Do you think this is a good scenario or do we make this machine a dev server and introduce a staging server for some projects as well?
I wrote him a reply with some suggestions (and my consulting rate) attached, and we had a little email exchange about some improvements that could fit in with the existing setup, both of the hardware and of the team skills. Then I started to think ... he probably isn't the only person who is wondering if there's a better way. So here's my advice, now with pictures!
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Mercurial Primer
21 February 2011
Read moreI am a source control nut, I've been speaking about Subversion for years, I co-lead an active open source project which uses git and GtiHub, and I've also dabbled with Bazaar. So far I'm feeling the limits of Subversion, loving the code-hosting features of some of the DVCS tools, and hating git and github in equal measure (don't bother to try to talk me out of this, I'm well aware the problems are mostly on my side). I don't know anyone else using Bazaar in the PHP community but I do know quite a few people raving about Mercurial, or Hg. This post is a quick introduction to the commands I have been using since I started trying out Hg and BitBucket for myself.
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Bzr-svn: Preserving Commits and Rebasing
26 April 2010
Read moreRecently I've been using bzr-svn when I'm working with subversion repositories; its a bridge between a local bzr repository and a remote subversion one. I travel fairly frequently and the pain of being disconnected from the server, unable to diff or log, and then either unpicking everything I've done or …
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Speaking at PHPWM: April 6th
29 March 2010
Read moreNext week I will be making the trip to my original home town of Birmingham to speak at the PHP West Midlands User Group, on 6th April. They are an active user group and although I haven't managed to organise myself to attend their meetings before, I do keep meeting …
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First Steps with bzr-svn
26 August 2009
Read moreI'm an SVN nut - love it, use it, talk about it at any opportunity, can't physically write code without it. But as a telecommuting developer who is sometimes travelling around, I've been thinking for a while that one of the distributed systems would really make more sense. I tried git …
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Upgrading Subversion Server to 1.5
06 August 2009
Read moreI'm really excited about the magic merging features in the newer subversion versions at 1.5 and later. I'm still figuring out which are actually useful, more on those another day, but I wanted to mention something I ran into when upgrading my server.
Some time ago I upgraded the …
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php|tek 2009: Tutorial Day
19 May 2009
Read moreI'm currently attending the php|tek conference in Chicago. Today is tutorial day, and I delivered a half-day session with Matthew Weier O'Phinney of Zend. Our session was entitled "Practical SVN for PHP Developers" and the slides are online. The session seems to have gone over pretty well - this is …
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Quiet Diff
21 April 2009
Read moreI recently saw a problem that we were having difficulty replicating, despite assurances that both the code base we were replicating on and the one that exhibited the error were identical. They are large codebases and when I got copies of them both I tried to check for differences:
diff …
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Simple SVN Merging
10 March 2009
Read moreToday I had a big SVN merge to do - i'm at the end of a development cycle and I needed to merge my branch of changes back into trunk. I dug out my crib sheet for merging and tweeted that I had - and a few people asked me to blog …
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Ibuildings Seminar, Leeds
25 July 2008
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My employers, Ibuildings, have been running a series of seminars where we invite a few people (and it is a few, they are generally small events), bring some of our developers along, and have some technical tutorials, demonstrations and general discussions, and some food. The previous events have all been …