Wednesday, October 27, 2010

DVCS talk at BeJUG

On October 20th, together with Jo Voordeckers, I did a presentation at the BeJUG around distributed version control systems (DVCS).
The goal was to give an overview of the features of these tools and also what they could bring over Subversion, which was the tool mostly used by our audience. The DVCS focus was on the ones we knew: Mercurial for Jo, Git for myself. Sorry for the fans out there, but once again no Bazaar.

The presentation was well received and we were lucky to have a very active audience that asked many questions. It seems the pain points of Subversion are well known, but the shift in thinking required to approach DVCS still blocks many from trying them out.
As a way to approach DVCS, I explained that my main Git experience comes from using it as a Subversion front-end. And I think this can be a great way to learn to appreciate the freedom such a tool gives you. It helped me a lot once again at work today.

As always, alongside the technical questions, we had also questions around the process and human interactions. Know of a shy developer not willing to let his code run wild?
I do not see these tools solving such problems. When the people or their relations are problematic, trying to fix these using tools has a tendency to increase the problem. You need to apply the fix at the right level, easier said than done though.

If you missed this presentation and live near Brussels, Belgium, we will most probably do a replay for the BruJUG. Stay tuned for details.

Jo also blogged about the event and has the slides available on SlideShare.