Benjamin Golub’s blog

My development environment has changed pretty drastically in the last year or so. I went from using Visual Studio, to Eclipse, to gedit, to vi. I started out really slow with vi but everyday I learn more tricks.  I’ve gotten pretty minimalistic as I’ve become a better programmer; I just don’t need the heavy IDE, fancy intellisense, or syntax highlighting anymore.

Even my version control system of choice has changed significantly. My first VCS was CVS and I hated it. Then at Hyland we used SourceSafe which was even worse. If you are familiar at all with SourceSafe then you can understand why it took me so long to decide to use a VCS on my own projects. When Hyland switched to AccuRev I finally saw the light and realized how important version control is. I started using Bazaar on all of my personal projects because I loved its decentralized approach and how easy it made branching/merging.  At work we use SVN.

I suppose if I worked for a different company I’d probably still be using something proprietary like Visual Studio for everything; but I’m glad that I know my options and understand the right tool for the job.