Eli White (Jun 13, 2009)
Talk at Dutch PHP Conference 2009 (English - US)
Programmers seem to have a fairly good grasp on 'how to write code', but not always what to do with it once it's been written. This talk with delve into details about how to manage your codebase, and how to manage releases (often intertwined). It will cover topics of coding standards and focus heavily on how you choose to use versioning tools to handle your development and release processes. It will have a distinct Subversion(SVN) flavor to the talk, but the concepts will not be specific to SVN.
Quicklink: http://joind.in/592
Jun 13, 2009, 12:58 by Anonymous
Nice introduction to version control, I like your suggestion to automate the releases which we've done with our system to manage (sub)branches & releases.
BTW we're applying a DDL to our target databases to update the structure, which is much nicer than using SQL IMHO.
Jun 13, 2009, 19:59 by Anonymous
The information was well organized, I appreciated the three branching strategies covered, a good formalization of something that's often "just used" in practice.
Unfortunely, the rest of the talk felt a little shallow. Any deep discussion of topics like CI, unit testing, integrating with QA department, code metrics, everything I would've liked to see is completely absent. Also, the speaker clearly sets up all of the data to fall inline with his personal preferences.
I would hope at this point that calls to use VCS would be preaching to the choir at a conference like this. There's so much more to this topic than just "the way I use subversion" and I'd love to see an expanded look at this.
Jun 13, 2009, 20:17 by Anonymous
Great talk again! There were some very good examples on different ways of code versioning and/or release management, and the pros and cons of these.
Because of this talk, we will certainly review the way do things and most likely tweak some things.
Jun 13, 2009, 22:13 by Miljar
Nice presentation. I know virtually nothing about versioning tools, other than that they exist. That part was interesting for me. But as Andrei pointed out, I would really have liked a view on the entire picture, with CI, unit testing, ...
Jun 14, 2009, 12:59 by esnoeijs
Perhaps my expectations were wrong, but I was expecting something more indepth and more about the actual release management. This was more a talk about "how to use svn"
Jun 14, 2009, 13:43 by drm
Very easy to listen to, but I missed some stuff like how to effectively use svn:externals for common code base management, and maybe some more in-depth of the actual *management* of the releases. But, that's more of an expectation issue, the content of the presentation was fine.
Jun 14, 2009, 21:41 by rickmb
Good talk, smooth presentation, excellent content. Would have liked a bit more depth concerning deployment (especially DB deployment), but the part about branching and release strategies was very helpful.
Jun 15, 2009, 12:50 by Anonymous
Nice to see my company has a good release management strategy. Although the issue we are having of automated deployment is for the DB, would have liked to go a little deeper into this.
Jun 13, 2009, 12:50 by janl
Excellent overview of deployment basics and the different strategies to do release management. Each with their advantages and problems. All sprinkled with real-world experience and examples. A great talk for for both beginners and experienced attendees.