I've recently become addicted to Joel Spolsky's blog, co-founder of Stack Overflow, and thought I'd share for those of you who haven't ever read it. Joel on Software contains a plethora of articles on proper programming practices, project managing, and the-like.

I honestly hadn't ever heard of The Joel Test until the other day when I was looking on jobs.stackoverflow.com, which lead me to his website. Thought you guys might want to check out some of his articles. He's been in the industry since the 1970's and has worked on quite a few major projects and has seen the industry and how it has evolved over the past 40 years. In fact, he pretty much posted a book out of blog articles, haha. Quite a bit of wisdom, I would presume Especially since he's still in the business.

Joel On Software
The Joel Test
Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon (followed by II and III)

Also, all these articles don't really require extensive knowledge of technical terms to comprehend. I encourage anyone with a bit of extra time who is interested in some of the content on his blog to check it out. I've definitely become a fan

Fascinating stuff, Swivelgames; I was especially enjoying reading about the Joel test. Enough stuff has broken on DCS over the years by accident that I'd like to move to a CVS; I'm thinking of setting up a CVS/SVN server either on Cemetech or on one of my Linux servers at school for easy trackbacks to where a bug appeared.

As am I

I'm going to get my feet wet in Mercurial. It looks pretty good and he wrote an incredibly simple and easy to understand tutorial on it called Hg Init. Check it out if you have time to, it's very short, actually

I love that site! Btw, another amazing site by a Stack Overflow co-founder is Jeff Atwood's www.codinghorror.com/

F-ing brilliant.

CVS sucks. SVN isn't bad, but you might want to consider something newer and better like git. But CVS is terrible.

You can also get free SVN from google code, easier than setting up your own server. Not that its hard to setup a svn server, just throwing that out there.

Setting up an svn server is a easy. It was a one day sidenote in my RoR/ActiveRecord/MySQL focused software development course a couple years ago, and it's more than sufficient for my needs.

I think the guys at Wolfire are using Mercurial for their newly opensourced Lugaru code, and they said Mercurial is a little odd because there is no definitive branch.

CVS does suck (especially with multiple developers), but it does work, which was the point made. I, personally, wouldn't touch it with a 20ft pole. Another point to make is that this was written roughly 10 years ago and things have changed when it comes to software available. SVN is much better then CVS, and with tools like git, Mercurial, and many other's, no one should have trouble finding a source control system that is suitable.

I've heard plenty of pros and cons about Mercurial, as well. The problem with using Google Code is that it doesn't support git (hopefully will in the near future). It only supports Mercurial. I'm curious to try it out, though, and see how well it performs. I'm not too afraid of experimenting with version control systems.


On another topic, I've been looking at three books he's suggested in some of his posts. Peopleware, The Mythical Man-Month, and The Peter Principle. Has anyone read these?

I just recently got back from Barnes and Noble and read the preface(s) (since it's the anniversary addition) and the first chapter of The Mythical Man-Month and it was better then I thought (although, that just means good, seeing as I'm not much of a reader).

Which is weird since Google uses git for its own projects. Android, for example, uses git.

To throw it out there, usb8x on SourceForge was under CVS until I converted it to SVN. It did suck, but it also worked.

I also use the SVN repository at http://brandonw.net/svn/calcstuff/ for my own calculator projects.

Yeah, exactly. Android uses gerrit too. I'm not sure why they won't support git. There's been rumors that git support is coming but still no confirmation (it is Google) and no evidence of it.

My point exactly