Alain M. Lafon

Ever since I evaluated and implemented project management software for my current employer, I have been a big fan of trac. While I knew about the downsides of svn, I liked the upsides of trac: it’s lean, it’s clean, it’s Python!

During the last year, however, I came to realize that even though trac is a great tool for many projects, it might not be best for my personal projects. For one, social visibility is close to zero – in part because I like to host on my own server. Second, I was wrong to think svn is good enough for smaller projects – even when working alone git has major benefits. If only for being able to work offline, worry free distributed backups and beyond human speed. Anyway, “good enough” sometimes is just a fancy argument for being lazy.

So, last week I finally decided to get over it and to try github and git as my SCM toolset of choice. To use github is a no-brainer these days – just about every day I read great stories on HackerNews or reddit/r/programming. It’s not just about free hosting, that’s not a real problem anyway. It’s all about social visibility these days. Not having a github link on your CV will lead to certain questions.

Being on the wrong end of this discussion can be unnerving. It’s not that I can’t defend my point of view. It’s because everyone asking me about it has been right. After having worked with github/git the last couple of days, I conclude those tools have become mainstream for a good reason.

I’m a strong advocate of kaizen – to always improve yourself a little bit. I also encourage people to not only use the tools they know, but to always seek out for the best tool for a new job. I now have to realize, that concerning SCM it was me who had the outdated mindset. trac certainly is a great tool, I won’t deny that. But there is space for improvement. Time to move on.

Turns out, I’m a pretty active coder in my spare time. I worked on four projects the last few days, three of them visible on my new github account. Just smallish hacks, but hell – that’s what I love about coding: always being able to tackle new problems quickly and upfront; it is not about the big bucks – those are a side-effect.