Host with the Most

My beloved robot, BattleBot, who has been the topic of most of my recent blogging, has a new home on the interwebz. That's because I've recently created a Google Project Hosting site in his honor so that other, inferior robots may look upon him and become inspired by his awesomeness...

In all seriousness, the reason I did this was to gain experience with configuration management systems and subversion, neither of which I had ever used prior to this. After downloading the SmartSVN client and interacting with my subversion repository, I quickly realized how much of a "game changer" configuration management really is. Having worked on a few projects with small amounts of code in a group before, I know how hard it is to manage the sharing of files and how difficult it can be to track changes and stay in sync. Thankfully, subversion makes collaboration much easier. It was simple to set up and get running, and although there are some practices that I will need to get used to (running 'verify' before every commit, etc.), overall it really does make life easier.

One of the things that I really liked about the Google Project Hosting is the ability to track changes to the source code and even view the changes in the source code directly in a side-by-side view. The idea that if my partner makes a change, I can view that change without opening Eclipse or downloading any files is really nice. However, I was a little surprised that it also showed every change I made to the wiki pages as a revision as well.

Overall, I think configuration management and subversion are really going to be helpful once I start collaborating more with other students and working on group assignments. I think it will allow me to focus more on writing code instead of spending too much time emailing files and trying to stay in sync. It definitely relives some of the headaches that can occur when collaborating.

BattleBot Google Project Hosting Site: http://code.google.com/p/robocode-ajo-battlebot/