Protoshell

I don’t know about the “Release Early, Release Often” maxim. What you can end up with are a lot of released code that is buggy. For some people this can be a major turn off in adopting your software.

I know I have been releasing often for Template Lite and have had some bugs crop up in a couple of the releases that shouldn’t have been there. Fortunately most of the releases have contains a lot of new content or features and not been mainly bug fixes.

Plus for the last week I have had one hell of a bug tester helping me with the next version. He has been using it in a commercial application that tests just about every feature. He has saved me from releasing a couple of buggy versions this week.

What surprises me is how someone wouldn’t have backups of any project they are working on. For myself I have the same version of my projects on three different computers. My work computer where I program and test everything. My local network server for remote server testing and finally another server outside my local network.

Since I use Homesite 5.5 I have it setup with a backup directory where it saves a copy of every file I save. Kind of like using a local CVS without all of the overhead and obfuscation.

If your work is important you should have it stored in more than one location to prevent it from being lost due to a mistake or hardware failure. Heck, it’s not that hard to setup a schedule under windows to make a backup of certain directories to a different drive, if you have more than one drive, every few hours or every day.

(shakes head)

2 PCs, 1 with a separate HDD and my iPod. I won’t be losing anything important soon.

On release early, release often… Depends on the project and its design. Problem with doing everything privately, and then releasing, is that you can often wind up losing the feedback other users can provide – and some of which can be surprisingly valuable. The bigger and more complex – the more one should be actively seeking peer review. Plus you can often get those absolutely irritating edge cases out of the way early instead of having everyone moan about it not working on their server because of some idiot hosting company’s idea of good service…;)

Definitely its not always true…but the few open source projects I’ve been involved in tend to benefit from it. I know I certainly don’t mind installing code marked RC or Beta even if it means a few bugs.