Last week we moved our main web project from Subversion to Bit Bucket / Mercurial. I suspect this year we will be moving everything off Subversion on to a distributed version control system (DVCS) such as Mercurial. DVCSs are simply amazing tools, designed for modern programming practices.
I was just as skeptical as many other Subversion users are: that DVCS is a complicated system that just makes more work for you.
The fact of the matter is whatever overhead you think you are taking on with all that DVCS forking and merging, it is nothing compared to the savings and flexibility over centralised VCSs. Just being able to have programmers manage source code in their own private repository, without interrupting the main source tree of production code, is worth the effort to learn a DVCS such as Git or Mercurial.
All of this is a benefit to our customers. Not directly of course, they don’t need to know the mechanics of how we manage our source code, but they get flow-on benefits from improved efficiency of software development. It gives our programmers more time to spend on coding, and less time with administrative work. Happier programmers are more productive programmers, and productive programmers are happier programmers. The cycle is virtuous.
We are proud to be a small, lean software company that can make these kinds of changes to our processes without being bogged down with bureaucracy and meetings that larger companies tend to engage in. So if you have been working in a slow moving organisation as a software developer and looking for a change, why not get in touch with us about opportunities to work together? We would love to hear from you!