Subversion : free repository hosting and client tools

I recently tried out the subversion hosting offered by opensvn.csie.org.
Setup took me about 10 minutes and it works as a charm.  My only concern is about confidentiality : how can you be sure that your source code is not copied and used by the owners of the site?  My guess is you can’t and you simply need to trust the guys…  or set up your own webserver of course 🙂

For the rest I’d like to congratulate and thank the people of opensvn for their offered service which is completely free.

As a subversion client on windows  I use tortoisesvn, a shell integrated svn tool that works very well.  On linux the tkcvs tool version 8 has a lot of features and is easy to use, you can always use the command line as well :-).  A vim/gvim plugin is also available at www.vim.org

How to be a programmer

I just stumbled upon a very good article called ‘How to be a Programmer‘.  It covers about every programming aspect you can think.  Check it out!

Anti-pattern overdose and bad smells

Today I was doing some occasional code reading.  In fact it was a colleague that let me read some source code he stumbled upon.  We never saw so many anti-patterns in one code read session : magic numbers, middle man, spaghetti code, very long functions with huge switch statements, code duplication, it was all there.  I was wondering what to do with this discovery : go to the author of this marvelous piece of code and explain our objections or refactor the code ourselves?  The former options seemed attractive but after reflecting a while I chose not to bother because, after all, the code worked and management does not care about clean, maintainable and optimized code.  So my colleague decided to refactor it himself…  I decided to do some research and write a tutorial, both for beginners and advanced programmers on how to properly design and write clean code using design patterns and be aware of bad smells in code…  The only problem remaining then will be on how to motivate people to put the theory into practice.  To be continued…