Every day is a surprise

It's been a strange week. No single day has been the same. I'm still trying to get a grip at my new job. What should I do, what not and how should I do stuff. This week I have been visiting customers, meeting potential partners and doing quality assurance work. Every day new plans arise about great stuff I should do. So many new plans that I hardly have time to finish my old ones. This is a familiar story for me: to many plans for only 24 hours in a day. Slowly I'm getting the control back of my day to day job. It takes a lot of planning and keeping lists of "what to do today". But it get's the job done and that's the start!

Things I didn't learn at school: sourcecontrol

I graduated in 2003 as Bachelor of Information Technology from school for professional education in Holland. I did learn a lot to be a software engineer. Coding, requirements analysis, UML modeling, database design etc. But still I'd lacked a lot of "working" knowledge or maybe it's just a lack of experience. But one thing I really learnt the hard way is sourcecontrol. The basic stuff I already experienced at school. The usefull parts I did not. And while I know the theory by now, I'm still struggling with taking it into practice. But still I think that good sourcecontrol is essential for delivering quality software with as less problems and hurdles as possible. I learned a lot of valueable lessons about sourcecontrol during work but still it would really have helped if I learned this stuff at college.

At my company we work with visual SourceSafe end vary basic sourcecontrol mechannis as check-in and check-out. And that was sufficient until some months ago. We now have multiple locations around the world and we had a lot of issues dealing with maintance and developing simultaneausly on projects. Thats when SourceSafe started to hurt. We need to abilitity to easy share projects with people around the globe and we need sharing and branching. But I still can't figure out how it works in SourceSafe.

So we are on the hunt for a new Source Control system to help us overcome this problems. Team Foundation server looks promising, as well as SourceGear vault and subversion. The next weeks we will decide between those systems.