I just wanted to give a shout out to one of my clients. They are probably the most “green” company I have ever worked with. We recently developed a custom accounting system for them. This reduced their paper usage by over 60%. They are no longer faxing/mailing reports between their satellite offices and the corporate office, because they now have access to that same data in real-time. And they can email statements directly to their customers.

We recently integrated their website into the accounting system. This allows users to order sod online, and eliminates redundant data entry.

On top of all that, their product keeps our air fresh and clean. They grow and distribute tons of grass every day.

Next hurdle, get them to the top for Sod Riverside, Sod Los Angeles,
Sod Sacramento

What were you doing this day (May 15th) in the year 2000?

I spent 6 hours working on a redesign of PowerComEnergy.com, 0.4 hours working on LubeSource.com, and 0.3 hours fixing bugs on BestBolts.com.

You may be wondering how I know this. And yes, I do have a really good memory – but not that good.

You see, earlier that same month I also launched a site I built: TrackMyHours.com. I have a complete record of all my hours on any of my projects all the way back to 5/5/2000. TrackMyHours.com is great for consultants like myself who need to track billable hours.

As a small software development shop, we have always used VSS. At first we had VPN issues so we jumped through all of the hoops to get it running on IIS with their provided webservice, But then it was always a pain getting a new project added to VSS properly (anyone else have projects like $/MyProject/MyProject - isn’t that annoying). And then whenever we had to get a new developer working on a project it was a difficult process to add a windows account, then a VSS account, then give them instructions on how to connect VSS using https and most of the time one little setting was off and they could not get connected.

On top of all of that, we could not view version history from within Visual Studio (the vss internet plugin does not support it). And when offsite, we could not even connect to sourcesafe using the regular client.

Checkin/Checkout kills productivity. I cannot tell you how many times I used to sit and wait on IM for one of my programmer to checkin the project file so I could add a form to our project. Or else wait for them to checkin a file (that they had not even finished testing) so I could make a small change to the file myself. But for years, I just thought that is how source control worked.

Then one day – my eyes were opened to concurrent development. I had heard of it before on open source projects, but didn’t really know anything about trunks, branches and merges. I knew visual studio team system worked this way, but every time I looked at the price tag on vsts, I knew that was not an option.

I read about CVS style source control and SourceGear Vault. Now my team and I have eliminated all of our connectivity issues, we are no longer waiting for checkins, and we can easily view file history (and even line history!). Vault has changed the way we develop and even the way we deploy websites and applications. Our deployment scripts grab the latest version right out of source control (we did this before with VSS, but their command line app did not work over http).

In Vault, setting up new projects is a breeze. I love the idea of creating a separate repository for each project (in vss we had to keep all our projects in one database so we could use http). And storing the repositories in SQL makes my backups much easier to maintain since they are already automated thru my existing SQL backup routine.