On 5/1/07, Dave Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[. . .] Can you give me any suggestions on how I can convince him to join the rest of the civilized world and use revision control daily, without being a jerk and going over his head?
All I can offer is my own story: I was doing an assembly code optimization project for that 300-level computer architecture class at BYU. Being somewhat of a loner I chose to do the project alone and was actually doing quite well. Unfortunately I hadn't quite met the target yet and the only thing left was loop-unrolling, which I honestly didn't understand at the time. I asked the professor if he thought I should turn it in for partial credit or dive in and try loop-unrolling. He was very confident that I'd do just fine so I plunged forward and gave it a try. The whole thing blew up in my face completely to the point that I actually started to try to rewrite the dang thing from scratch. I actually managed to do that and it was ridiculously fast, but it lacked the errors the original algorithm had so the output wasn't the same and I failed the project completely. It was such a blow to my ego at the time that I gave up and flunked out of that class. I also had really bad headaches for a while. I was a defining event in my life. I have used revision control faithfully ever since. It would have saved me in so many ways. Actually I can offer one other bit of advice: separate production builds / deployment from the engineer such that nothing actually gets built / deployed without being checked in. Many companies see this as a requirement anyway and you can sometimes use Sarbanes Oxley (sp?) to scare them into it. Anyway, making it a procedural change should help make it less personal. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
