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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago I joined a small company, replacing a guy who was their only developer. He was pretty disorganised, and one of the first tasks I gave myself was to get the source code for the company's main product into a revision control system (Visual SourceSafe, I think). This turned out to be far from easy because his idea of versioning was to have multiple copies of the full source tree with the root directory named with a woman's name.

Its been a while, but I remember it took me weeks to satisfy myself that I'd identified the correct sources for the builds that were then in production.

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A place I interviewed at 2-3 years ago 'what source control do you use' 'oh sometimes we check things into sourcesafe, but usually just share the folders'.

Surprisingly it is a good way to filter companies still!

Last year, I worked on a PHP application. Getting it to a CVS trimmed down the folder from 3 GB to 100 MB with essential assets. They just dumped things in there and backup the whole server instead.

At one point I worked on a project where for source control the previous people would just copy/paste all the code in the file into a block comment at the bottom of the file. Some files were three hundred lines of code followed by several thousand lines of block comments containing near-identical code. To be fair, these were non-CS students who had never been taught any different.

The first company I worked for in the 90s used a floppy disk for each version, double floppies if it was a release version sent to the customer. A section of a drawer in a filing cabinet was allocated for each product. Versions were stored and retrieved using SneakerNet.

I had one of those experiences as well, but in my case, "version control is for the weak". he had multiple copies of the code deployed for different customers, and could never reconcile. unfortunately, the tech scene here is very well connected and I learned way too much about his personal life.

in my case, I ended up just rewriting to be multi-tenant with a fully different stack, and let him disappear; it was really what ended up being the best for the company and my sanity.

Since I have nothing to add: yikes.

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