[UPHPU] Source Control Questions

[Lamont Peterson]

On Friday 29 December 2006 10:49am, Scott Hill wrote:
> On 12/29/06, Lamont Peterson <peregrine at openbrainstem.net> wrote:
> > Which kind of programmer are you?  Which kind of management of
> > programmers will you have/will you provide?  Sure, if there is dedicated
> > IT staff that are responsible for deploying apps, then by all means let
> > them set up your alpha test environment.  But developers really should
> > set up and maintain their own boxes if you want them to produce workable
> > code.  This works by the
> > embarrassment factor, when their code won't run on the alpha test
> > platform.
>
> Ouch!  Many have and do work in environments that are not as "perfect" as
> what you describe and for some reason their code still seems to work and is
> indeed workable.  I don't think they're embarrased by their work either.

Yeah, well, I should have phrased that one less aggressively.  Sorry if I 
offended anyone ;) .

You are, of course, right.  The environment does not necessarily make the 
programmer.

In my experience, when working with programmers who do not understand how the 
environment their code will be run in, the code becomes "workable" (as in 
finally does what it should do and integrates with others' code) only after a 
lot of review/reject/rework cycles, usually involving a lot of my time (even 
to the point, in most cases, where they just became a speech-to-text 
processor in the end).

Personally, I only want people on my team who can work productively without me 
having to reject and hand-hold the fixing of nearly every code submission 
they make.

The point I was trying to make is that I don't feel the viewpoint of "punt to 
IT for developer's systems/environments" is a path to finding good developers 
nor encouraging good programming practices.  Of course, there are exceptions, 
but I think it's good to do whatever you can to make sure you have the best 
quality people and provide them with tools that let them be as productive as 
possible.

Was that better?
-- 
Lamont Peterson <peregrine at OpenBrainstem.net>
Founder [ http://blog.OpenBrainstem.net/peregrine/ ]
GPG Key fingerprint: 0E35 93C5 4249 49F0 EC7B  4DDD BE46 4732 6460 CCB5
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