Over the last year at work, my development team has had a lot of success in implementing new tools. It's hard to imagine life at work now without our daily builds in CruiseControl, NAnt, NDoc, FXCop, and the occasional NUnit (or TDD) test. Hell, even VSS is pretty new to us!
In the interviews that I hold with new applicants, I ask them if they've worked with any of these tools. The experience varies, but all of them except for source control seem to be new to most interviewees.
Another stock interview question is 'Do you code at home''. Most developers say 'yes', which brings me to my doozy question ' 'Do you use source control at home''. I have never met one developer that answers yes to that question. Stop for a second and think about that ' what would you think of a software company that didn't use source control' I'm pretty sure that I know what you'd think - that they're a bunch of bloody fools! So why is it different when you choose (and it is a choice!) not to use source control for your hobby coding at home'
Which made me start to think ' do I use any of our work tools at home' Of course, the answer was no. And you know what' I should know better. I'm not old enough to use the old line 'do as I say, not as I do', so I started to implement some of these tools in my home coding.
I use SourceGear Vault for my source control. It has a free license if only one developer uses it. Lucky enough, I'm the only developer in my household software team! We use VSS at work, so using Vault at home helps me to learn a different source control provider while still protecting my code.
I also use Gemini for managing my tasks and workload. I can't tell you how many times in the past I would think of some cool new feature for my hobby coding. But of course, it would only exist in my head. Sometimes I'd get high-tech with it and scribble it on some receipt that I had kicking around. Or maybe it would go into some obscure text file that sat in My Documents with the hundreds of other fantastic ideas. I think you're getting the picture ' I needed some organization. Not the multi-level dependency level of organization that MS Project gives you. I needed a nice and simple application that could track what I wanted to do and when I was doing it. Gemini does this.
I've recently received an Open Source License for Gemini on my home system for developing the DNN 3 version of my Pick'Em module. I can't wait to start using it to track the future progress of this module. It doesn't make me a better developer, but it makes me a bit more effective. And that's a good start!
In the future, I'm hoping that FXCop, Nant, NDoc and CruiseControl start to show up on my system. NUnit is something that I absolutely, positively must start using (once I learn how to!). But I'm getting there.