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Comment by moconnor | Hacker News Reader

This is really true. Back then we were still using CVS, and I was writing a feature that I thought wasn't quite big enough to branch and remerge for, but turned out to be a bit more involved to get right than I'd thought.

Now we're on Mercurial and life is better.

Edit: A nice win with the Linode is that they back it up for me for $5 a month. Sure, there are solutions for the desktop too, but somehow I never got around to using one of those.

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There are two kinds of programmers: Those who’ve earned their experience the hard way, and insufferable know-it-alls who parrot whatever was in the last witty blog post they read.

There’s zero shame in being the first kind :-)

And one shame in being the other : P

What's the URL to the blog post where you read this? :)

http://twitter.com/#!/raganwald/status/131738600931995648

:-P

i think i'm in a wormhole!

Recursion abuse!

I would observe that with DVCS, if your hard drive crashes you can still lose several days of unpushed code, too. I recommend and use cron jobs to push and/or rysnc things around on a more frequent basis for my really important stuff.

You could buy a second hard drive and put it behind your other drive and occasionally copy important files from your front drive up to your back drive.

Or use TimeMachine if you are on a Mac.

No, if TimeMachine screws up a file it stays screwed up for ever after every backup, there's no integrity checking. It also completly barfs on large files that change little by little. The best example of that is the entourage mail store, but any single file db will do. I've seen clients bit bad by these problems. Don't get me started on the time capsule...

What should we use instead?

Linus's solution is to write software that people run and use daily.

Point your Time Machine backups at a NAS that's using ZFS with block-level deduplication.

Option-click on the Time Machine menu to verify backups. Sleep well.

Works great until your computer/home/office catches fire.

Personally I have a mirrored drive set that I use as my primary storage, and a third disk that I rsync to nightly and use for backups of other stuff, because I don't trust that I won't have filesystem errors or controller problems that might render both disks in the mirror unusable. Then on top of that I use Crashplan to ensure I have an offsite copy.

For most of my code I also push to github or private external repositories regularly and/or pull to my laptop.

Maybe a bit paranoid, but I've had to recover from enough scary hardware and software failures over the years to not want to take risks.

Dropbox fixes this.

Raid and rsync are your friends. Use them.

What's wrong with a remote branch you push to and then merge back into master afterwards?

Was my second sentence really that incomprehensible?

This is why I keep my working copies in Dropbox

second that... my working folders are dropbox... and commit to cloud git repository as needed.

Same here. I had some sort of electrical problem with my last computer and lost my hard drive due to it. Unfortunately, my back-up drive was also plugged in at the time and it got fried, as well (really bad luck/timing there).

One of the first thing I did when I got the new computer was to put a symlink to my projects directory in my Dropbox folder, so that all of my projects now get backed up to Dropbox automatically.

We keep our main repository in under dev/$PROJECT and backup repositories under user/$USERNAME/$PROJECT. Then we set a post-commit hook to push to the backup server on commit. Setting up the backup and creating the hook is done by a shell script you run after cloning.

I'm always doing

  git push origin develop

for this reason, but some environments probably don't allow you to do this easily? I work alone. (EDIT: be nice to people)

We typically work in personal feature branches before merging into develop; if you use a similar workflow there shouldn't be much issue at all from pushing constantly.

Can you protect from other folks pulling it? Sometimes people just don't want to reveal their code while is ugly...

Gitolite[1] will let you mark branches as private on the remote either by specific branch name or a regex (ex: any branch that starts with "swah-" is private to you) if you want privacy before revealing your code.

[1] http://sitaramc.github.com/gitolite/

Thanks for sharing. Did you consider switching to a smaller laptop like a Macbook Air / Netbook?

No, I wanted to try something radical and crazy and new. Frankly, I expected to be back on my MacBook by now. This has been as much a surprise to me as anyone!

I tried out an iPad app called Koder, it was nice but still lacked some things.

Your post has got me wondering about Vim again.. :) Making the switch to Sublime Text has got me appreciating a more shell-like interface for some things.

Have you ever found yourself wanting to code and not have an internet connection? I think that's a pretty rare scenario, I'm rarely offline.

I haven't wanted to code offline for months. Maybe if I flew for more than two hours I'd miss it. Even the trains have wifi in Germany.

The few times I have wanted to code offline, I've also wanted to look something up >.<

Haha, that's really true. I rarely code offline, maybe it's just another umbilical cord that we should be examining.

Between having tethering and generally ubiquitous tethering, we should be good.

I think I want to try getting into VIM again. Is there a good resource site you like, where I can find a decent guide and some pointers on where to find some language dictionaries? Totally off topic but I'd appreciate it.

I recommend just running "vimtutor" in terminal once you've installed Vim. It's the best introduction. Far better than the online tutorials that sometimes pop up on HN.

Once I got the basics down (15 minutes in vimtutor), I noticed enough productivity gains to use it immediately for note taking and scripting. Then I just decided to jump in and use it for a real project. I learn new hotkeys, plugins, and config tricks every week and I just feel my productivity inch its way up and up.

Vim on my 11" Air is excellent. SSD is nice and fast, and I wonder if the total weight is less than the ipad+bluetooth keyboard.

Nope, Ipad: 601 g (613 g for 3G), 11" Macbook Air: 1080 g, I was unable to find the keyboard's weight but it can't be 400 g.

According to Amazon the keyboard weight is 522g.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-MB167B-A-Wireless-Keyboard/dp/...

Making the Macbook Air 11" the lighter option.

That is the boxed weight for shipping.

I have the wireless keyboard (the older three-AA revision) and it's comparatively lighter than my 7" Tab, which is 380 g.

edit: Charlie Stross says 325 g for a four-AA revision in http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/ipad-wri.... Macworld says 323 g in http://www.macworld.com/article/150600/2010/04/ipadwhichkeyb...

My Apple wireless keyboard (model A1314) has 2 AAs, have there really been that many revisions?

I don't personally recall the four-AA revision. Wikipedia links to Apple's press release http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/09/16Apple-Introduces-W... which confirms four AAs.

My keyboard, bought in November 2008, part number MB167LL/A, definitely takes three.

Current revision available on Apple's website is MC184LL/B and that one is well known to only require two.

It's more difficult to setup, but it's wonderful to have a dedicated development cluster. Put everyone's home directory on a dedicated file server, which uses NSF to be global to the cluster. Then you can do automated backups on the file server - hourly, nightly, monthly, whatever. There are file server appliances which are configured for this sort of thing.

When you do this, much less important data is stored locally, on developer's actual machines.

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