Sometimes It Does Matter

There's a tendency these days to be so completely jaded by the marketing and advertising that assails us daily that we tend to discount the ability of new things to actually, significantly improve our life. We all know the new economy sedan you buy isn't going have people in the street stopping and staring - you really think anyone cares about your new econobox? (you would think people stand slackjawed in the street from almost any car commercial), just as we all know that wearing some over-hyped scent isn't going cause you to be attacked by a hoard of attractive women, and so the tendency is to view any promised improvement with such a degree of skepticism that even when someone has something that will really improve our lives we generally ignore it as just another over-promoted piece of junk.

Then, every once in a while, we are completely flabbergasted when something actually is better. And not just slightly better, but noticeably and dramatically better.

Two examples of this happened to me recently, one of which is slightly gross, so feel free to ignore the rest of this paragraph if you have a mental aversion to matted together clumps of fur. We have two very furry cats, both of which have, in the past, had a major problem with hairballs. We've fed the IAMs cat food for the entirety of the 5+ years of their adult lives. In the past couple of years, we had a noticeable increase in the number of ridiculously disgusting hairballs that we would inevitably step into first thing in the morning. A discussion with our vet led us to try a whole bunch of different options, including feeding them a tuna flavored petroleum paste (Yum!), switching to Science Diet, and brushing them more often. Nothing worked, nothing had any effect. Then one time we were going out for the evening and had run out of cat food. The dog boutique around the corner from us sold a couple of different types of higher-end cat food and because we were running late I ran over and bought a bag intending to use it only as a temporary subsitute (I'm completly aware that changing cat's food all of a sudden is not recommended, it's not something we ever do, just this one time - I promise). Over the next week, subsisting solely on a diet of the new Serengeti food, we had a total of 0 hairballs deposited on our floors. Over the next fours months, that number has stayed at zero. It's quite possibly one of the most amazing differences I have ever experienced in switching only the brand of something.*

Why did I just post an utterly pointless anecdote about our cats? Because I had another completly transformative and utterly unexpected experience recently in the realm of software development. When it comes to source control, we've used Subversion for the past year and 1/2 and I generally used CVS for the decade or so before that. The switch from CVS to SVN didn't really bring any major benefits - in fact it was such a pain to get up an running correctly under apache that I borked the repository a couple times before getting everything up and running and stable.

Source control in general is about as exciting as talking about your house's foundation. It's really important that it's there, but you don't bring it up at dinner - most of the time you just don't want it to fail. Git - a relative newcomer to the SCM scene although fairly entrenched ruby-wise - is different. It's worth talking about.

It's a complete game changer in terms of how I do my development and the mentality with which I attack some programming problems. Need to prototype a feature? In two seconds you have a branch in your current working copy that you can muck around with to your hearts content before reverting just as quickly. At the airport and need to create a branch or check out a previous version? Not a problem. And that's just the start.

I would just say this - if you haven't checked out one of the newer Distributed Version Control systems (DVCS), such as GIT, Mercurial or Bitkeeper, and have always looked at source control as nothing but a safety net to keep the intern from destroying the company, it's definitely worth checking out, in fact it restored my faith in humanity.

* As an unhappy aside, in the 6 months between starting this blog post and actually finishing it and posting it, Serengeti changed their formula and our cats refuse to eat it now. Requests for information from the company have been unanswered. We're back in hairball city. Inquiries to the company have gone unanswered, oh well, I'm sure there's a lesson there too...