Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
What tools or approaches would you recommend to a 'one-man team' to keep organized?
I'm doing research that involves a lot of coding, writing hundreds of throw-away perl scripts, C++ binaries that get used until I find some better approach, large amounts of data that gets preprocessed in different ways, where some new preprocessing makes the old way obsolete -- until I find out that the old way was actually better, and so on. My work is inherently a moving target, as I have to try many things out, and often none of it is perfect.
It's not a completely chaotic situation, but it's also far from perfect. Are there general approaches that you would recommend in such a situation? I do use SVN for my code, although not for the different versions of the data because that gets too big. It's hard to keep track of all the scripts and binaries, so I always comment them, write down how I ran them etc. But I'm curious if you have some additional ideas.
(I work on a linux system.)
I'm using a wiki (TiddlyWiki in my case, as that runs absolutely anywhere - all it needs is a browser with JavaScript) as my "engineers notebook". Almost anything goes in there - lists of questions (and later on their answers), procedures (steps by step instructions), notes of what I put where (might work for your "data"), phone numbers (easy to find with a full text search), anything goes.
As my tasks are not that code-heavy, I'm even using it to store code-snippets (mostly SQL statements for me). Using a "real" versioning system is better if you want to keep track of different versions. Other than "use it" I can't offer specific advice for this area.
However, what has been important for me in GTD fashion: Use a simple system for almost everything. That way, the time to search for something and to decide what to put where is cut down.
Keep all your code in your Version Control System, and create build/run scripts for each. Your data you are going to have to carefully file away (since you don't want to put it in SVN).
The other thing I would add would be a wiki so you can make notes quickly about each test/script/application.
why not checkout some opensource projects to see how they organize their code bases?
even though you are a one-man team. it'd be smart to organize your project so it would be easy to add more programmers.
also if you're worried about filesize for data files you might want to checkout git. the index size is usually a lot smaller than that of svn.
Version Control is a must, as others said. Keeping descriptive labels of milestones on Version Control is very very helpful I think.
Also as IronGoofy said, I keep my snippets in my Personal Wiki TiddlyWiki, I uploaded it to my website, so I can access it anywhere, anytime.
As an additional option you may think a Time Tracker application. There are many free Time Trackers. I use ASP.NET's Time Tracker Starter Kit. You can keep evolution of your software, bugfixes, milestones.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
First of all, we're all beginners, so I am really sorry if this is a trivial question.
We're developing a game in Unity3D. We have two programmers, and one artist. We'd like to make our life easier by not just simply communicating via Facebook and sending our stuff back and forth. I know about GitHub, but I have a couple of problems with it.
It's not free for closed source projects - which would be ideal. Is there an alternative? Is this even the right kind of site to use?
Stupid reason, but I just can't comprehend how it works/how to use it. Is there an easy tutorial for it or something?
Is it even 'compatible' with Unity3D? Since I don't really know how
GitHub works, this might also be a really stupid question.
First of all you can use Bitbucket to host your stuff. Its like github without the open source community.I'm using it on a similar project I'm working on with some guys. It's important you understand that git is version control software developed by Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux kernel). Git can be used to "commit" changes to a project. Then your other coder could grab those code(script in unity?) files and load them into him project. It is kind of overwhelming to learn to use at first, but it gets easy once you get it. Really learning to use git is one of the best things you can do for yourself.
As far as using git goes, I use linux so I can just 'man git' to look at commands and then use said commands in the shell. Mac uses bash so it probably is run right from the shell there too. Honestly I don't know at all for windows.
Here are a couple of resources:
https://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI3yVcSahzk
If I had more time I would look for a really good one for you, but I'm going to be late for work!
I have developed some Unity3D projects using GitHub before. So to answer question 3 and the last part of 1 first, yes Unity projects use a file-system architecture that is perfectly compatible with GitHub and once your used to it it is a great tool for team development.
Answer for question 1:
GitHub is just a name brand for a centralized version control system and there are other brands out there with similar offerings such as bit bucket. Google this term for more info. also look into distributed version control as well.
In all honesty though, if your new to developing, the product you will be making will most likely not be of much interest to other people on GitHub and your public repository will probably go unnoticed. If you believe that what you are creating is of such great value it needs to be kept secret, then investing a few dollars a month in a premium service is recommended anyway.
For other options, one would be to set up a central Git repository on a server (or one of your home computers) that you or one of you project mates is running. This might be a more complicated method but you would learn a lot of other useful things along the way.
Answer for question 2:
See -https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/- for github's intro tutorial. Also Youtube has some decent offering if you search for how to use Git Hub.
It can be a little daunting to work with something new and attempt to understand the documentation. If you are planning on getting serious about development though, especially in a corporate setting, you need to learn GIT and practice reading and understanding documentation.
Good Luck!
I recommend git for just about any text-based version control. If the files are binary heavy, it still works but it's not git's strength.
Until you get the central hosting worked out, you can use git bundle to share the changes offline.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I help make promo/event websites that shoot up and come down anywhere from a month to six months.
Clients ask for minute text edits a lot during the creation period, and during the live period they sometimes like to swap out images or text every few weeks to function as updates. It's inconvenient for the client to do this all through emails and phone calls.
I have been asked to do research to find a CMS that will let the clients do minor edits like this.
I was pointed to big dogs like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and Typo3, but these are all very heavy-handed.
I settled on trying ImpressPages because of its inline editing and undo log but it too began to ask for a lot - I tried to adapt an old project to it but it insists all content calls and form submissions adhere to its framework so it's definitely not easy to drop in.
I don't need a CMS that handles page creation or any sort of overhead.
What I need is a CMS that doesn't care about any facet of the page other than editing text, swapping images, and probably a pretty secure login. Since we take care of the backend and it's only live for a few months it doesn't need detailed project maintenance and certainly the client should not have access to that.
Do you have any suggestions for lightweight CMSs that are easy to pop into a project?
11/11/14 EDIT:
Results so far:
I think a good alternative for this problem is Create.js and one of its children ContentBlocks, however they require node.js and REST which I have yet to really figure out. Quite different from what I know. However, this system allows for editing in-line on the page and saving right there, with no overhead menus or settings or anything. Just edit divs. Here's a link:
http://createjs.org/
children projects can be found by snooping the github
There are more CMS options out there than almost any other web technology. That said some are more and less easy to customize. It sounds like you've steered away from most of the common answers, although I really think you might want to look at WordPress again, with a little setup work and customizing the admin page it can be super lean and "dead simple" like Tumblr's interface.
That said there are a few more good options that are very light and yet full of potential!
Database back end
Perch – This one isn't free, but it's not expensive. It is built with the designer in mind (by other designers) and is also built with the end user in mind, thus it is light, flexible and the interface is not daunting to the non dev. And has very very good support.
Cake PHP – A lovely bit of OSS work, that will need some setting up by you or another dev, but once you have boilerplate/templates it should be simple to roll and unroll small sites.
Anchor – Another OSS project that seeks to be powerful but slight in it's footprint, but probably more structured (less pre-dev time required) than Cake PHP.
Flat file
No DB required, the user just puts their stuff in folders (like on their desktop) and then they get webpages - kinda brilliant and maybe just what you're looking for.
Pico – Uses PHP templates, but a simple file folder based structure, so there is very little learning curve to running or setting up the site.
Kirby – While this is not free, it is very well supported by original developers. It is designed with the goal of being dead simple to use and support.
Dropplets – This one is very very simple, possibly too simple, but there is very little to make a confusing interface out of. This one is very blog focused.
Hope that helps guide your search, as this list is far from exhaustive.
I have also been looking something easy and lightweight for clients to use for days. There are tons of options but there always seems to be something a bit off.
Finally yesterday I found two very good candidates:
Really impressed with both of them have been developing with Drupal, Conrete5, Wordpress.. but this is what simple sites need! Wow!
TidyCMS
http://tidycms.com/
Free / cheap license
Static pages hosted on your site + a connector that connects to the hosted editor. Basic package free.
"TidyCMS is a flat databaseless CMS that makes HTML-files editable and dynamic."
A Finnish startup who are creating a super simple product!
It could not be easier you just throw in a static html-template and put a TidyCMS-conector folder and browse to the subfolder. The subfolder connects to the hosted editor. The editor lets you click on page elements to make them editable. The interface is pretty okay. A bit rough though still, with some glithes. Seems to be in heavy development, but it's already pretty usable. The UI hangs sometimes, for instance when saving changes and you have to reload.
Instant Update
http://instant-update.com/
Open Source! Free! GNU General license.
This seems to be more mature. Also handles static html/php -files but the CMS seems to need a database. The inline editing is pretty good and stylish. The system also has backend with simple user and page management. Still in development by a small group of guys. I'm sure they'll welcome more people.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
At our company we've built a data integration tool that we have sold to several customers. Most of the customers have distinct requirements. We implemented these customer-specific extensions by using a self-made mechanism based on inheritance (so every installation knows which classes to load and which not). But all this customer-specific code is still in the same codebase as the standard code.
Now, this is no longer possible for several reasons (codebase getting ugly and large, clashing requirements, etc.)
For this reason we have decided to separate the codebases: one for the standard product, and several customer-specific codebases.
I am now trying to find a version control system that supports this approach. Here's my wishlist:
support for several "standard" codebases for different releases
1.0 release
1.1 release
2.0 beta/development
support for multiple "customer" codebases
ability to create a customer codebase by cloning a standard codebase
ability to change standard code in a customer codebase
ability to update a customer codebase with a new standard release (and somehow marking the conflicts that come from changed standard code in the customer codebase)
As our team is still very small (~4 programmers), it should also be easy to handle by the developers themselves.
Btw, our software is built using Spring with STS (so, an Eclipse plugin would be great too).
All VCS that I have researched so far seem to have that target of building one piece of software - not several. I am hoping for some suggestions or best-practice approches.
Simply
Simply get git, go for pull request process and take advantage of some GUI, supporting this workflow.
Are releases much different form custom development?
To clarify, what is the situation you are facing: "standard" development comes in versions, they might live independent for maintenance, you may need to get some fixes from new versions to be incorporated in older releases, you need a way to solve hotfixes.
All these things are well solved by distributed version control systems like git, hg or others. I have started with hg, but later found, git is used more often and in standard installation offers all what is need (what is not a case for some hg features).
Regarding custom development - in fact, they do not differ conceptually much from standard versions - you just need another modification of your program being identified under unique name, which will eventually denote, these are custom things.
Branching or pull request process?
Now how to approach different "swim-lines" for different versions and custom developments?
Branching workflow models
Obvious answer is "branching". There is a lot of tutorials on various branching models and they shall be solving your problem.
However, branching is not trivial either and you may find long disputes on what style is the best one.
Topical repos and pull request workflow
Fortunately, there are even simpler solutions - Pieter Hintjens article http://hintjens.com/blog:24 about "Branching considered harmful" provides simpler model, using topical repositories and pull request process. This is how many projects on GitHub and BitBucket are managed and I found this really the most effective solution with minimal risks.
Final recommendations
For pull request working process, it is handy to have some GUI, which supports related communication - and apart form GitHub and BitBucket, there are solutions on the market (incl. some open source solutions).
Prepare yourself for long run - starting with linked article by Pieter Hintjens may make your run a bit shorter, next step could be playing with a project on BitBucket or so, then design "the final" system (which will anyway evolve during time, but git repos are well suited to keep with the changes).
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
Is there any version control software with the functionality of Git, but which is not under a viral license? - A "viral license" being, by my definition, one which requires derived software to be under the same or an equally-restrictive license.
I'm not interested in an argument on or discussion about the GPL; it's outside the scope of this question and website.
Thanks.
Fossil is (and Codeville was) a BSD-licensed distributed revision control system.
Note that unless you're actually modifying the version control software itself, the license doesn't affect you; you're free to develop non-GPL'ed software using a GPL'ed tool to manage revisions.
The other options are :
Perforce
Bazaar
SVN
CVS
UPDATE:
Since 2 years passed since started professionally working with git (after 20 years of not-git...) I can say this:
GIT has it's advantages when it comes to merging code bases between branches and multiple users. Once you master it, and learn to ignore its - sometimes utterly confusing command line UI - can be easy to work with.
On the downside, GIT IS complex to understand and LEARN. There is a long steep learning phase, especially if you work from the command line in multiply branched repository (the common and the recommended approach). Working with UI tools like InteliJ IDE's can hide some of the details, but these require their learning attention and time too + some not so basic GIT knowledge. And this knowledge is required by ALL members of your team.
OLD AND (not so) BELOVED ANSWER:
Forget the license... You want to NOT use GIT for so many other reasons...
If you want things to work faster for your team - stay away from GIT. Why not use SVN? It is supported by any service that supports GIT, and is the most popular alternative to GIT (as far as I know).
To commit/merge/manage a team in GIT it'll take you exponentially more time than other SVN/Fossil/... All in the name of advance "distributed" design, and a rich set of methods to kill your code, merge it wrongly, give you so many options to do horrible mistakes (that happen to pro's and newbies alike), and do simple things the HARD HARD way. Were in reality it only serves the ritual hungry souls of geeky programmers, who would otherwise have to go home late and face the empty walls of their houses... (poetic answer too).
REALLY - It would actually be funny if it wasn't the number one pain-in-the-arse time killer in the office. And once you go GIT you can never go back, so my advice, don't let the geeks have it. Keep it out or pay the price.
And, yeah, I know the crowd here, and I am more than willing to loose a few points. It's not like it means anything real.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
when starting with a project and using source control i find it hard to separate the things people are working on so they don't either write duplicate code or think it should be named one thing and so on.
this problem diminishes over time because the general foundation is in place and it's easier to separate the tasks so they don't overlap as much
how do you manage working with source control in the beginning phase?
EDIT:
I can see that it don't really have anything to do with source control, but it gets more apparent when you have source control too. so the question becomes more along the lines of "how do you manage to separate the tasks so they don't overlap too much. I think it's really hard and i haven't really seen much about how to do it.
Well, as far as source control goes, somebody needs to take the lead and set up the basic structure of the project, directories, etc. and communicate it to the team. On projects I work on, this is usually an architect or senior developer, someone who knows the best practices for project organization for the team/company.
With respect to avoiding having multiple people working on the same tasks, that's a project management function; someone needs to determine what tasks need to be done, and communicate it to the team. If you are working in an agile/scrum environment, the team may divide and hand out work items amongst themselves, but in either case you need to communicate to avoid doing the same work twice.
EDIT
To address the issue of multiple people working on the same task, I tend to work on smaller teams, 2-6 people; in this environment, I have had a lot of success with a scrum-influenced approach using the Crystal Clear methodology:
Architect(s)/designer(s) come up with high level design
Architect(s)/designer(s) define iterations/deliveries, the first of which is a "project skeleton" which consists of architectural and back-end components and a thin slice of the app
Lead person breaks up features into 1-3 day tasks/units of work (estimated)
Team meets and discusses priority, timing and dependencies of tasks, and divides up the first set of tasks
The team has brief daily meetings to discuss status/priorities and dependencies, and change direction if necessary
With larger projects/teams, you will almost certainly need someone whose main job is dedicated to tracking status, dependencies and conflicts.
I don't think source control has much to do with the problem of coordinating people's efforts (except that it can catch some "conflicts" when people erroneously try to modify the same files in different ways -- but, that's not as good as preventing conflicts, and even just "preventing conflicts" does not per se ensure that everybody is working on what they should ideally be working right now, in terms of priorities). Coordination is properly managed with practices (and perhaps tools, e.g. Pivotal Tracker -- but, using the right practices is even more important than using nice tools!-) that specifically focus on ensuring coordination. For example, the practices that Tracker is designed to support and enhance, such as story-based iterative planning, and other compatible ones, such as stand-ups, offer ways to meet these needs.
You must be having a base version that everyone is using, check that into the repository, and then make incremental changes to the repository, make sure that everyone works on different part of the code, commit every working change, and resolve conflicts as and when they occur. That is how I would do it.