I’ve been using Subversion for many years, probably since 2002 or so, and when I started using it, I imported my existing CVS repository, which contains stuff dating back to 1995 or so. It’s a big and (to me) very valuable archive, especially since I started early on to put all sorts of stuff in there – not just source code, I mean, but rather everything that may be versioned, and that just benefits from being backed up in that repository. All my business paperwork, things like that.

(As an aside, I’m regularly surprised that many people don’t seem to do anything similar – what do you guys do with important documents that aren’t source code? Every now and then I have this discussion where somebody has the opinion that a source control system only needs to be integrated nicely with Visual Studio to make them happy, and I find that position extremely weird.)

I’ve always hosted my repository myself, in my home office and/or at the company I worked for. Up to this day, the main reason for doing so has always simply been connection speed – the same problem I have with using cloud storage and that sort of thing. Where I live, my broadband connection gives me a 3Mbit downstream on a good day and typically less.

Now, after many years of hosting my infrastructure myself, I have decided in recent months to make an effort to push things outside a bit more. My personal internet connection has been the bottleneck every now and then when I was away – maybe the main reason for me to change my mind.

I looked at a few hosted subversion providers, but I have now decided not to go for any of them. I might host my own subversion on a dedicated server somewhere – will see. But I just wanted to document my reasons for a decision against a hosted service, because when I was looking around on the internet, I had the impression that these things were rarely discussed.

• Starting at the beginning: where are the services hosted. Well, all over the place of course, but I think that’s an important consideration. If my source code, and other even more important content, is stored on servers owned by a US company, for instance, what impact does that have on legislation applied to my property? To be honest, I don’t know, and I don’t want to spend time and money finding out. It just seems a much safer bet to host in the same country where I live, which brings down the choice of providers quite considerably.

• I saw some people comment that they prefer a free service. What a weird idea is that? There’s a consideration regarding long-term reliability there anyway, and if a service is free, that issue suddenly tops the agenda, doesn’t it? And let’s not talk about warranty – IANAL, but I know that in many countries there’s no warranty whatsoever for free services. Kind of understandable as well. So – “free subversion hosting, super-duper nightly offsite backup, somebody personally copying every byte onto a secondary server on commit” – worthless. Please charge me, so I can even begin to trust you!

• Some services aren’t cheap at all. I can almost get a dedicated hosted server somewhere for a similar price. For me, there’s always an implied advantage in the latter – agreed, it’s because I know what to do with such a server, and that doesn’t hold for everybody.

• Finally, and most importantly: I wasn’t able to find a single provider who made reasonable promises, at least, about keeping my data secret/private. Why not? I want my data encrypted in its own private partition of the machine, for instance. I want info and guarantees about checks performed on the personnel that maintains the servers. This is essentially the same huge problem that’s out there with cloud computing – I’m not putting my business papers on somebody else’s machine without that sort of guarantee.

If you are a provider offering hosted subversion services, and you think I should consider your service because you don’t have any of these issues, feel free to let me know - for now I’m all set with my own setup on a dedicated hosted machine, but who knows what the future holds.

I did a session on Functional Programming in F# at ACCU conference recently. I had a good time – if you were there, I hope you did, too!

Here’s a zip file with the slides and samples for that talk. Quite a bit more than I actually went through in the talk, so have a good look around the content!

ACCU-FPinFS.zip

Just had this conversation in Twitter - well, as much of it as the 140 char limit allows.

Somebody (keeping things anonymous here - own up if you want to! :-)) said the best session at the community event WebDD was one where the presenter had trouble with his laptop and couldn’t show any demos. Not the first time I hear something like this - perhaps I wouldn’t be bothered if it was. But most community events these days seem to have one or the other such incident.

Well, I’m afraid I don’t like that sort of a statement. I totally appreciate that issue happen and you can’t be prepared for everything. It is great to be able to pick up the pieces and continue when something odd happens. And it’s interesting and even impressive to watch somebody do it well. But.

When I go somewhere to do a presentation, especially if it’s more than an 8 people user group meeting, I come prepared:

• I have my presentation materials on a USB stick.
• I have thought about the worst-case scenario beforehand - that is, typically, losing or breaking my laptop
• For that reason, I have everything I need on that USB stick. My source code, my PPT files, and, yes, all installers for all software I’m going to use, that could be considered non-standard, and is therefore likely absent on somebody else’s laptop.
• If I need something larger for my presentation, like a VM on an external drive, I carry a copy of that VM. Yes, really. Why not? In many cases it’s going to fit on the USB stick these days, and a second external hard drive doesn’t cost much either.

There is very little cost involved with this sort of preparation. There is no reason, apart from thoughtlessness, why somebody would not come prepared like that. Personally I tend to carry a second laptop some of the time, for what I consider more risky situations - but that’s of course more costly and not something I would expect everybody to do.

In any case, what I’m saying is that this sort of setup and preparation helps solve issues like BSODs, even if they happen in the middle of a presentation. Not 100% of the time, no. But they will allow me to do the presentation I came for in the majority of cases, which I presume is what the attendees come to the event for. Nothing more and nothing less.

And that brings me to the core of my disagreement with the statements above. Wether well prepared or not, issues sometimes come up that nobody expected. That can’t be worked around even when well prepared. Perhaps somebody tries to restore his working environment on a secondary machine and that machine turns out not to be up to the job somehow. Maybe. And he still soldiers on and manages to do a talk on his topic. Admirable? Sure. But.

Does that person deserve to be lauded as the most interesting act of the event? I don’t think so. Surely, his presentation was less perfect than it could have been without the issues. Surely, other speakers who didn’t have any trouble deserve to be mentioned before that poor guy. Because they were luckier, maybe. But also because they came to deliver a perfect presentation, and they did. In contrast to that other guy who didn’t, however much fate was involved.

Surely, if you are that speaker with the perfect presentation, you want your deserved spot in the limelight. Especially if we’re talking about a community event where people are ever so slightly less professional overall, and also less used to that limelight.

For a little while now, I’ve been doing a podcast together with Gary Short, which you can find here:

http://www.sodthis.com

The latest installment is episode 3, where we interview Michael Foord on the topic of dynamic languages. Give it a try, it’s fun!