Curia

There’s been a lot of noise in the development community over the last year or so about DVCS. Being highly opinionated myself, I can’t help but take a minute to share my own thoughts on the matter.

Let me start by first of all saying: Yes, it’s true. Distributed Version Control Systems really are everything that Centralized Version Control Systems (read: SVN/CVS) fall short on. However, having been a long-time Subversion user myself, as well as the fact that I hardly ever work on a team with more than a couple of other developers, it took a lot of noise to make me even care about the differences between DVCS and CVCS. So what is the difference you might ask? Almost everything; and that’s a good thing! (ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the benefits are so profound it almost feels that way)

Don’t worry, I’ll spare you the repetition of what has already been said elsewhere. My story is this: I spent about a month looking at the various DVCS’ and eventually narrowed it down to Git vs Mercurial (why anyone would use Bazaar over Mercurial is beyond me). Since I’m a Linux user, and since Github impressed me, I finally decided to go with Git on the next project that came my way. Boy oh boy do I wish I had run across this article beforehand… (continue reading…)

Note: A few months ago when I started drafting this post, Firefox v3.0 had just been released and I was enjoying it immensely. I started this post with a rant against IE (still included) and a call to Sarafi users to “get with the movement”. Well, a lot has changed since then. Safari 4 is really slick, Google did the unthinkable and released a browser of their own, and Internet Explorer 8 actually likes web standards. So, I am finally publishing this post with a few slight updates and edits.

I’ve been playing around with Mozilla’s latest release, and I’ve got to say: Firefox is where it’s at! If anyone out there is still using Internet Explorer, you deserve anything that comes to you by way of malware, adware, spam, viruses, etc. Seriously, get with the times and install a real browser! And to you Apple/Mac users out there: Yeah, Safari is nice, but don’t let pride keep you from branching out of familiar territory.

One of the great thing about Firefox is its add-ons, and I’ve decided it’s time to dedicate a post to a few of my personal favorites: (continue reading…)

I’m the type of person who is a bit anal about trying to use what I think is “the right tool for the job.” This is something I think my Dad passed down to me (I can’t tell you how many times I was scolded with that phrase as a kid—usually having something to do with me trying to hammer an object with anything but a hammer); and it influences my world of development heavily. Because of this, I often find myself using a number of different programming languages and technologies at any given time for various projects. A shell script is perfect when you need something quick & dirty. PHP makes adding logic to HTML a piece of cake. And then there’s my new personal favorite: Python.

Ok, let me back up before I get ahead of myself… (continue reading…)