The Morning After

Sorry for making a promise I could not keep. After my last blog post on various subversion hosting companies, I became ill. There have been hospitalizations and operations and . . . .

But I am back now and looking forward to blogging again - SOON !

Check back on Tuesday for an update on subversion hosting solutions.

cs

Subversion Hosting - The Very Good, the Acceptable and the Lousy

In my search for a new provider of subversion hosting, I looked at 11 companies (Lighthouse did not make the cut because it turns out that it does not provide subversion hosting!). My 6 criteria were:

• reliability (uptime, length of time in business,etc)
• site performance
• customer service
• extra features (project management, bug tracking, etc)
• level of community participation
• cost

The results on reliability and site performance are in and it paints a very clear picture. The performance of companies easily groups into 1 of 3 categories - Very Good, Acceptable and Absolutely Lousy.

First, the Very Good. The following companies are the clear winners on performance. Each of these providers of subversion hosting had websites that were materially faster than their competitors and also had 100% uptime over the 10 days that I tested:

http://svnrepository.com/

http://unfuddle.com/

http://beanstalkapp.com/

Next, the Acceptable. The following websites were noticeably slower than svnrepository, unfuddle and beanstalkapp but had acceptable speeds. It should be noted that 2 of these "Acceptable" providers barely made it into this group because of service interruption during my testing period - assembla (> 1 hour) and versionshelf (< 1 hour).

projxprt.com
cvsdude.com
assembla.com
versionshelf.com


Finally, the Absolutely Lousy. I do not know why anybody would use any of these 3 companies to host their code. All 3 of the Absolutely Lousy had websites that were very slow when compared to their competitors . And both codespaces and hosted-projects experienced serious downtime during my test period.

devguard.com
codepsaces.com
hosted-projects.com

Tomorrow I will be back with my findings on the remaining four criteria.

cs

Looking for New Subversion Hosting - The Criteria

As I posted a couple of days ago, I am looking for new subversion hosting. I spent some time reviewing my needs.

First, a little information about my company. We are small - there are only 5 of us. 3 of us sit in the US and 2 sit in Europe. At any one time we are working on 5 to maybe 10 projects. Our typical project lasts 3 months or longer. Still, we see quite a few projects in a year.

Money matters to us but I expect to pay for subversion hosting. I see that there are some good free subversion hosting companies out there. And I have already opened accounts with several of them just to look around. But we do enough business to justify the expense of having someone else handle the details.

So ... my criteria are

• reliability (uptime, length of time in business,etc)
• site performance
• customer service
• extra features (project management, bug tracking, etc)
• level of community participation
• cost
  

As I said, I have already opened some free accounts to check out some of the subversion hosting names on the list I made in my June 8 blog.

I expect to have my first "results" in a couple of days.

cs

Looking for New Subversion Hosting

I am not real happy with my current provider of subversion hosting. So I have decided to look for an alternative. I spent some time this week looking around. I can tell you that there are a lot more alternatives to consider than when I first started hosting my code with third party providers in 2004.

Although I see no reason to name my current provider, I will name the ones I have decided to consider:

http://cvsdude.com/

http://www.assembla.com/

http://www.hosted-projects.com

http://unfuddle.com/

http://www.projxpert.com/

http://www.codespaces.com/

http://beanstalkapp.com/

http://www.wush.net/subversion.php

http://svnrepository.com/

http://www.versionshelf.com/

http://lighthouseapp.com/

http://www.devguard.com/



Does anyone else have some companies to suggest?

Also, I have my criteria (which I will go into in another post) but I am interested in what others look for in their subversion provider.

Give me a week or so and I will be back to you with my findings.

Rails Conference 2008 - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The party's over at RailsConf2008 and Portland can go back to being boring.

I promised a highlight reel and I am one to keep my promises.

First, the good - John Straw (yellowpages.com) on Surviving the Big Rewrite It's a great read because it's a success story

• Top 100 website in need of a lot more than a facelift
• 125k lines of code becomes less than 20k lines of code in rails
• Slightly less than 1 year from start (investigation and design) to launch

Next, the bad - which is not really bad because it is Scott Chacon's Gitting Git which is unfortunately 500+ slides but worth every page down keystroke. Git is hot - particularly in the rails world. So, if you are headed in the direction of GIT, you probably need to stop by and read Scott's tome. You can also listen to Scott's presentation.

And finally, the ugly - Guy Naor's Deploy Rails Apps Faster than Brewing Coffee The high point - his resume skips 25 work years. The low point - those hideous blue slides that keep reappearing. The even lower (as in subterranean) point - so little content and so much time to fill.

For an overview of some of the presentations, watch Gregg Pollack's RailsConf in 36 minutes Gregg is talented and helps the speakers give good overviews. Enjoy and see you in Berlin!

cs

The Glass Ceiling at Rails Conference 2008

It’s that time of year again. Everybody that’s anybody has been in Portland this weekend. I guess that makes me a nobody.

And that makes you clueless if you do not know what has been going on in Portland for the last 4 days. Hello. Anybody home? Can you say Rails Conference 2008? You know - as in where a couple of thousand of the world’s nerdiest men gather to eat, drink and sleep rails. I know what you are thinking – these guys already eat, drink and sleep rails. And you are right but this is in Portland of all places and at a minimum cost of $1,500 or so - unless you drive up from San Francisco and spend 3 nights in your car.

I can also say the world’s nerdiest men with a great deal of certainty. Because who else goes to a conference in Portland where there are less than 2 women for every 100 men in the room?

Did you see the list of featured speakers? There’s Thorsten and Dan and Jimmy and Jamie and Ben and a couple of Joshes. There’s Rick and Wilson and Scott and a trio of Brians.

There are more than 100 men lined up to speak but there’s only one woman - Andrea O. K. Wright. What’s with that? Is there only one woman in the world to whom they entrust a sacred Rails podium? Only one woman they respect enough to sit and listen when she whispers scalability and other sweet nothings into their nerdy ears?

That’s what I call the ultimate glass ceiling!

Oh well. As I said, I did not go. But that does not mean there was nothing of value to be heard. You might want to click over to the website next week and listen to some of the presentations. I will. I always learn something. And you probably will too

ps – Rails Conference Europe in Berlin is coming up this September for those of you who would like to visit Europe and do not care what the US$ exchange rate is.

cs

Everyone has to start somewhere . . .

Is this cool or what?

Two months ago I was thinking about blogging. One month ago I was feeling guilty that I had not started blogging. This morning I decided to stop feeling guilty and start blogging.

And now I am blogging. For free!

How do "they" do that? How do "they" earn money by giving it away. I looked all over www.blogger.com and there was no place to sign up for a blog that cost me money. How do "they" do that?

I guess I will find out as I go because I intend to blog for free - at least until . . . .

Two basic premises form my basis for this blog. First, the one with the most information usually outperforms. And second, I am where I am because people shared with me - so I intend to share some of the minutiae that I accumulate.

In other words, I like to have an edge so I crave detail. And I am giving back because I was given to.

Even if it turns out that I have something of value to share, how will people find me and this blog? Beats me. Outside of my mother who would read and cherish my To Do list if I would only give it to her, who else will read what I write? Beats me.

So . . . if you are reading this you are either lost or lucky. Time will tell us which.

Either way, I hope you return. I intend to blog about a lot of subjects. Most of them will be about programming (rails, java, etc) and tools that programmers use but occasionally I will veer off into more interesting stuff.


cs