If you do any kind of programming that extends beyond one-liners, you need to version control your work...even if you are a lone wolf weekend warrior, like myself.
Why? At least three reasons:
- Safety. Version control backs up your code, plain and
simple. Many options of course for this, but consider...
- Time travel.
A backup of your code files is one thing. A backup
of your work is another. Let's take the 3-month old, 500 line
script your boss wants you to run on new data. You try it on the new
data, but it borks. You investigate - you have a whole new f…
Tired of being a Perl script-kiddie? There are three things you must start doing with your code.
- Use version control
- Write tests
- Create distributions
You say, "No need to waste my time, only people who work in teams need that."
- Guess what, if anyone besides you will ever use your software OR its output, you're working on a software team.
- In 3 months when the boss says, "Hey, can you run that analysis again on the new data?", you will look at the code and say "Who wrote this?". Once again, you're working on a software …
How many of you are in my shoes? There isn't much scope for Perl coding in your day job, so you find yourself furtively browsing Metacpan, checking the latest Perl Weekly on your lunch hour, and dream about getting beyond Initiate. Maybe you scribble ideas in the margins of your weekly status report for that cool lowercase mononym you'll use for your first O'Reilly book (krusty...feldspar...molewhack...). But on the weekends, you're scaling the peaks of /users/mark_jensen/2013/09/index.html
Getting there from here.
CPANID: MAJENSEN