• LCrawford (unregistered)

    Today Mark is the CEO of his own business, Mark's Roofing and Siding company down on Main Street where he hung his shingle.

  • NotAThingThatHappens (unregistered)

    "I've got merge errors, every shingle time!"

  • Chris (unregistered)

    I expected Mark's source control to be a length of 2x4. Which is what you get whacked with if you touch his code.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    Proof that scaling is hard.

    And also proof of the old adage

    There are only 3 numerical values that matter to development: zero, one, and many.

    Each of those is far more qualitatively different than they are quantitatively different.

  • Prime Mover (unregistered)

    "The year was 1999 and" ...

    ... we were working our socks off ensuring y2k compatibility.

  • WilliamF (unregistered)

    TRWTF is CVS allowing stomping on the repository instead of failing with an error.

  • Richard Brantley (unregistered)

    What I find fascinating about this is that this sounds a lot like what Bob Martin describes his team doing - in the 1970s. (Clean Craftsmanship, p. 328-332). We seem doomed to keep re-learning the same lessons.

  • Nick (unregistered)

    Sounds like the "flame" system from Origin (via Mike McShaffry):

    When I first arrived at Origin Systems, I noticed some odd labels taped to people’s monitors. One said, “The Flame of the Map” and another “The Flame of Conversation.” I thought these phrases were Origin’s version of Employee of the Month, but I was wrong. This was source control in the days of “sneaker net,” when Origin didn’t even have a local area network. If someone wanted to work on something, he physically walked to the machine that was the “Flame of Such and Such” and copied the relevant files onto a floppy disk, stole the flame label, and went back to his machine. Then he became the “Flame.” When a build was assembled for QA, everyone carried his floppy disks to the build computer and copied all the flames to one place. Believe it or not, this system worked fairly well. Many years later, I was working on a small project, and one afternoon a panicked teammate informed me that our development server went down and no one could work. We were only two days away from a milestone, and the team thought we were doomed. “Nonsense!” I said, as I created a full list of our development files and posted them outside my office. I reintroduced our team to SneakerNet—and they used a pencil to “check out” a file from the list and a diskette to move the latest copy of the file from my desktop to theirs where they could work on it. We made our milestone, and no files were lost or destroyed. Sometimes an old way of doing something isn’t so bad after all.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    Great story. But here in 2022 the "sneakernet" gets a lot more difficult. Don't try this at (AKA while working from) home kids.

  • Worf (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • (nodebb)

    YEs, Visual Source Safe had it's issues, and it definitely lasted long past it "best if used by" date.... But licensing??? That was never a problem....

  • (nodebb) in reply to WilliamF

    CVS does fail if you try to commit things when you're not up to date. That's what the -force option is for!

  • Old timer (unregistered)

    People who complain about VSS never had to work with CVS. There is a reason why "Source Control DBA" used to be a job title.

  • Russell Hansen (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.

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