SuperMondays on the Side
Last night we had a sell out event at the Side Theatre. This is an excellent venue and judging my the feedback we will be back there soon.
David Coxon started off proceedings and gave an excellent presentation of how he setup the online store for The Baltic. Rather than choosing an off-the-shelf ecommerce application, David and his team decided to develop the shop from scratch. This was a risky decision but one that paid off in the end because after many long nights work the site was released on time and significantly under budget. You can download Davids presentation here and watch the video here:
Paul Callaghan then gave a detailed introduction to version control and why saving your data in bomb proof bunker is rather useless if your disk fails. Paul went on to introuduce us to Git, a free and open source version control system. Traditional revision control systems use a centralized model, where all the revision control functions are performed on a shared server where every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Through a practical demonstration Paul showed us that branching and merging tasks are fast and easy to do. You can download his presentation here.
Finally we heard from Alex Kavanagh. Alex gave us an introduction to Subversion (SVN), another open source version control system. Subversion differs from git because it is a centralised repository, this means that all changes are checked into a central repository and users must communicate over the network with the central repository to obtain history about a file. You can see Alex’s presentation here:
I want to thank Alex and Hannah from Sailor Girl for finding and organising the venue for us.
