I know there will be people out there who totally disagree with me on this but sometimes proper source control is overkill.

Recently I’ve been working on a lot of small projects and with the addition of another computer to my ever increasing collection and I’ve increasing found that working between the laptop at uni and the desktop at home has been hard.

Keeping a track of all the changes and additions I’ve made, when I’m using proper source control I’ve got to remember to check in code from either machine when I’ve made these changes. This often means that if I’ve forgotten to commit my changes and the version I’m working with isn’t the latest what is the point in working on it at all?

The main problem I have with the proper source control approach is that I have to do a full commit with a commit message, this is great when I’ve got a new feature working or when I’ve fixed that Heisenbug, it gives me a point in time where I can go back and have a proper working copy of my code – this is awesome because I know that everything committed will be of a certain quality. But having to commit every time I swap machines means that this all goes out of the window, it’ll get a quick “Latest version” message and sometimes if I know something is broken it’ll have “x is broken” but at most that is what’ll have.

So where is the middle ground here? I wanted something that wasn’t manual, copying and pasting a folder around, which could be easily forgotten when moving machines and offers no protection from me being an idiot and copying an old version over a newer version. Obviously I think the proper source control path is overkill and eventually dilutes the usefulness of it so I found a better way to keep my source on ALL my computers up to date and available anywhere.

That solution is Dropbox and for me its easily the best solution for keeping things synced across computers. I keep a symbolic link of my work folder and it sorts the rest for me. Really its that easy. Sign up, install, sign in, create symbolic link and you’ve got all your work across all your computers.

Version control obviously has its place and is a wonderful tool that I push on all my uni friends as a great tool to use, and I use it myself to make sure I have another offsite backup and a set of steps (and working versions) of my work. But from now on Dropbox will save me time and headaches.