Git, invented in 2005. Programmers on 2004:
Git, invented in 2005. Programmers on 2004:
if this is real, that’s the kind of people who should be worried about being replaced by an ai
it’s also Claude
lmao
Was playing around with it. It’s neat tech. It’s interesting all the side projects I can spin up now. It absolutely cannot replace an engineer with a brain.
I’ve caught so many little things I’ve had to fix, change. It’s an amazing way to kick off a project, but I can’t ever trust blindly what it’s doing. It can get the first 80% of a small project off the ground, and then you’re going to spend 7x as long on that last 20% prompt engineering it to get it right. At which point I’m usually like “I could have just done it by now”.
I see kids now blindly trusting what it’s doing, and man are they going to fall face first in the corporate world. I honestly see a place for vibe coding in the corporate world. However I also see you still needing a brain to stitch it all together too.
Yeah, a coworker (also a trainee) spent 2 days trying to debug some C# MVC thing. It took me around 5 mins, from having last seen C# code 7 years ago, to realizing that the quotes were part of the literal string and needed to be checked too.
Well he did literally everything with the internal ChatGPT instance (or so a coworker said, I don’t know which model actually runs there). I asked if he wrote JS code, he said no. Well even though there was JS in the cshtml file, he technically didn’t lie, as he didn’t write it.
Wasn’t it Visual SourceSafe or something like that?
God, what a revolution it was when subversion came along and we didn’t have to take turns checking out a file to have exclusive write access.
Visual SourceSafe
Yes! That’s the one I was struggling to remember the name of. My previous employer started on Visual SourceSafe in the 90s and migrated to Team Foundation Server (TFS) in the 2000s. There were still remnants of SourceSafe when I worked there (2010 to 2013).
I remember TFS had locks for binary files. There was one time we had to figure out how to remove locks held by an ex-employee - they were doing a big branch merge when they left the company, and left all the files locked. It didn’t automatically drop the locks when their account was deleted.
They had a bunch of VB6 COM components last modified in 1999 that I’m 80% sure are still in prod today. It was still working and Microsoft were still supporting VB6 and Classic ASP, so there wasn’t a big rush to rewrite it.
At the start of COVID, I migrated our three projects to git from VSS. I also wrote a doc for our other teams to do the same. It was amazing once we got it working. Small team of 3, but we started using feature branches which enabled us to easily merge everything into a testing branch and release only certain features at a time. So much cleaner.
Before I left, I almost got semi automatic CI/CD working with Jenkins!
Yeah VSS was the predecessor to TFS, and now TFS is called Azure DevOps... whatever the fuck that means, Microsoft needs to get it together with product naming. Anyway TFS sucks major rotten ass. I have my problems with git - namely user friendliness - but TortoiseGit has put all those troubles to rest.
Nothing like that can fix TFS.
A place I worked at did it by duplicating and modifying a function, then commenting out the existing one. The dev would leave their name and date each time, because they never deleted the old commented out functions of course, history is important.
They’d also copy the source tree around on burnt CDs, so good luck finding out who had the latest copy at any one point (Hint: It was always the lead dev, because they wouldn’t share their code, so “merging to main” involved giving them a copy of your source tree on a burnt disk)
My first SWE job out of college in 2019 they were still using SVN because none of the seniors could be bothered to learn how to use git.
The “well this is how we’ve always done it” attitude had a death grip on that place
For what it’s worth, SVN is a much simpler object model compared to Git, which makes it easier to understand.
It’s centralized rather than distributed like Git is, which has some disadvantages. Most operations require access to the server, as opposed to Git where you usually have a copy of the entire repo and can work offline. Git users can clone the repo from other users rather than relying on a centralized server.
On the other hand, a centralized server also simplifies some things. For example, instead of commit hashes, SVN has revision numbers, which are natural numbers that start at 1 and are incremented for every commit. A lot of software that used SVN used to use the revision number as part of the version or build number.
Git is definitely the source control system to choose today, but SVN can still have its place.
Oh yeah, I remember using tortoiseCVS briefly.
Mercurial and Bazaar also showed up at around the same time as git, I think all spurred by BitKeeper ending their free licenses for Linux kernel devs.
An interesting shot to the foot, that one.
BitKeeper was a proprietary version control system that somehow (and with a lot of controversy) ended up being adopted by a big chunk of the Linux kernel developers, while others were adamant against it.
In any case, they provided free licenses to Linux devs, with some feature restrictions (including not being able to see full version history) only available for premium clients, while Devs who worked on open source competing systems were even barred from buying a licence.
When someone started to work on a client that allowed access to these locked away features, they revoked the free licenses, and a host of solutions started being developed immediately. Linus Thorvalds himself started work on git, and that eventually got adopted by the whole Linux ecosystem and, nowadays, the world.
rm -rfing the project and cloning it again.
Yeah, I was thinking of a new repo with no existing code.
In your case you’d want to uncheck the creation of a readme so the hosted repo is empty and can be pushed to without having to overwrite (force) anything.
Clone into new branch, merge, push.
I never use force.
~/Dev/Project/file.ext~2025-03-20-Backup-6
~/Dev/Project/file.ext-test-final5
already been explained to you
This step is optional
The first version control system I ever used was CVS and it was first released in 1986 so it was already old and well established when I first came to use it.
Anyone in these past forty years not using a version control system to keep track of their source code have only themselves to blame.
CVS was, for the longest time, the only player in the FLOSS world. It was bad, but so were commercial offerings, and it was better than RCS.
It’s been completely supplanted by SVN, specifically written to be CVS but not broken, which is about exactly as old as git. If you find yourself using git lfs, you might want to have a look at SVN.
Somewhat ironically RCS is still maintained, last patch a mere 19 months ago to this… CVS repo. Dammit I did say “completely supplanted” already didn’t I. Didn’t consider the sheer pig-headedness of the openbsd devs.