After working with countless files and making changes to those files over the years it gets difficult to remember exactly what you did, say, 2 years and 4 months ago on a specific file.  Wouldn’t it be great to know what you did way back then… wouldn’t it be great if you could see what somebody else did way back then so you could continue their work?

Enter subversion - A friend of mine pointed me to it and now I use it everyday because it makes my development so much more efficient than without it.  I really can’t imagine developing complex applications or even administering client websites without being able to track my changes.  Subversion is installed on most linux distributions and is a pretty popular open source version control program.  Subversion or just “svn” is run from the command line.

Why do I think subversion rocks?

• I can see what I did (and what my coworkers did) in the past
• I can better estimate future projects based on how long past projects took me and how many files I had to edit
• I can import past work into current projects instead of writing things from scratch!
• I can create template projects so that when I get a new job I just suck that template code in and make minor modifications
• I can hand off work to learning developers or another developer, track their changes, while I’m out getting another deal, and then finish their work knowing exactly what was done.

I’m sure there are many things I haven’t mentioned here that can be done using version control, it’s just awesome.  Right now I’m using svnX for os X and it’s pretty a pretty decent GUI interface to subversion.  I’ll probably post some cool subversion commands in the future, but do check it out if you’re a developer looking to be more efficient.