I'm now working as lead developer at Programmer's Heaven. Every so often, I'll be bringing you a little look inside, sharing some of the tools and techniques that we use to build and run the site.

Last week I completed migrating the Programmer's Heaven source tree to the Subversion version control system. Before I arrived, we were using a commercial offering, which I won't name here. I tried to give it plenty of chances to work well, and was patient when I heard a new version was coming out. However, the new version introduced new problems more than resolving the old ones, and I could never track down a pattern to the most serious issue, which led to broken builds a couple of times. It was frustrating knowing there were better tools out there; I had worked with Subversion on numerous projects before and knew that it was simple and Just Worked most of the time. It has its quirks, but nothing as close to annoying as what we were using.

Anyway, after months of suggesting we change to another version control system, they decided to make me lead developer, which basically meant that the migration was my problem if it went horribly wrong. Thankfully, after plenty of groundwork in the weeks leading up to it, I had the actual migration itself done and got our automated build scripts fixed up in the space of a day. I also took the opportunity for some re-organization of the repository so there's less top-level folders now - we'd spawned quite a few.

A good version control system is essential if you have multiple developers working on the same code base (and multiple means two and up - Tore and I could never have coped with us both hacking on the site without some form of version control over the last year). It's also useful when there's just one person involved too, especially if you are working on it over multiple computers. Being able to review any change that you did in the past or roll back to an earlier version of the code can get you out of all kinds of tricky situations. I speak from experience.

Anyway, that's your first peak at one of the things we're using here. I'll be brining you some more over the coming weeks and months. Questions welcome.