Comments Disabled

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame has attested to the benefit of comments to blogs. Yet after the loss of his site over a month ago, he still has comments disabled. I've always found his blog posts interesting and often controversial. While conversation of his blog posts can come from other sources such as Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News, the most obvious location for these discussions is on the blog itself.

As a blogger, one of the worse things you can do for you and your readers is to disable comments. Comments turn a lecture into a discussion and no matter how much experience or brains you have, there is always someone else who is knows more then you do. Not only will you and your readers benefit from a discussion but you will get feedback on your writing to make you a better blogger.

But Jeff already knows all this, since he's written about it a few times. For the sake of the readers of his blog, I hope Jeff re-enables comments soon. Jeff his always come across as a conversation starter not a lecturer and he should stay that way.

Pizza

It's Friday, so time for a break from the normal development post. I'll have some new posts starting next week.

Pizza is a topic near and dear to many a developers heats. But finding a good pizza at a great price can be hard. Thankfully, one of the cheaper pizza chains has made a change to their recipe that makes the decision easy. In terms of price and value, Dominoes new pizzas are by far the best deal out there. If you haven't tried their new recipe yet, I encourage you to do so.

If price were not an object. This is the order I world rank the Pepperoni Pizza of several national and regional chains.

• Pizza Hut
• Dominoes
• Papa Johns
• Donato's
• Little Caesar's
• Noble Roman's

Note that I'm a little harsh on Noble Roman's because their sauce does not agree with my stomach. Otherwise, they have good Pizzas.

I'm not a big fan of Peppeoni Pizza. I love Supreme pizza, and comparing this pizza yields different results

Donato's
Papa John's
Pizza Hut
Noble Roman's

I've left out Domino's and Little Ceasar's because I've never had Supreme form these stores.

What do you think of Domino's new Pizza? How would your Pizza rankings differ?

The one thing worse then a bad Source Control system

Source Control is a necessity on any software project of any significant size. Not only does it allow multiple developers to work on the same source at the same time, but it provides a historical record of the code and a backup in case a change needs to be undone later.

Choosing a Source control system for your project is a big deal and should not be done lightly. There is a massive penalty for changing systems. The historic data that is retained within the source code repository often cannot be migrated over to a new system. This means that all of the previous changes can't be backed out if needed down the road. The old source control system can be kept running for a while if needed, but management will eventually ax the server in the next round of cost cutting measures.

For this reason I believe that it is far worse to charge Source Control Systems then it is to continue to use a system that is a poor fit for the development team. One development project I once worked on has used 4 different source control systems in the history of the project, making it truly difficult to track down the history of a particular snippet of code.

I used to never comment where my code changes began or ended and left the majority of the discussion for the code check-in time. But for long lasting code projects, they will out live their original source control system. In this case another way to track changes is necessary even if it is at the expense of the cleanliness of the code.