Ted Naleid

This past week, I gave a presentation to the DevJam meeting on the advantages of using Mercurial, a DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) over tools like Subversion, Perforce, and ClearCase.
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In his book, The Productive Programmer, Neal Ford talks about using shims or jigs to help productivity. Jigs and shims are quickly created little snippets of code that automate repetitive tasks or make them easy enough that they’re worth doing. They’re little tools that help make your job easier and let you avoid using brute force to solve all of your problems.

My home directory has a bin folder in it that’s continually getting new jigs added to it, and my zshrc file is an ever-expanding list of quick shell functions.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot more work with Mercurial as the team that I’m on switched from Subversion a couple of months ago on our Grails project. The initial transition was a little difficult for some people, but I think just about everyone is pretty happy with the transition now that we’ve made it.

Something that has helped everyone get comfortable with more complex Distributed Version Control System like Mercurial has been the distribution of shims and jigs amongst the team. I thought these tips might be useful to others as well.
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I gave a presentation at work today on Distributed Version Control Systems and Mercurial. We’re currently using Subversion, and I’m nudging my co-workers into getting interested in the benefits of distributed version control over a centralized system.

The presentation starts with the pros and cons of distributed systems and gives a brief overview of the top 3 most popular DVCS systems:

• Git
• Bazaar
• Mercurial

I go into the details of why I chose to use Mercurial and describe some common usage patterns for people used to using Subversion.

I then did a live-coding session where I created a quick grails application, added it to a new repository, cloned the repository and pushed changes back and forth to show how mercurial handles merging and history.

I also suggest how developers can use mercurial as a “super client” to enable much of this power while still working on a team that uses subversion.
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