I’m starting to work on a hobby project which requires some development and one of the many issues I get when working on such projects is that I can’t spend as much time as I would like. The direct consequence is that I often forget where I was development wise so this time I decided to apply some of the professional principles I use to make sure the project moves on correctly.

The first and most important principle is creating a good development environment so it is a pleasure to get back to it without having to browse my code and documentation to realize where I was when I stopped working on it.

I therefore combined:

  • a working station: my MacBook Pro with a MacOS X and Windows Vista dual boot
  • good tools: Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs
  • And a subversion hosting platform

The latter was the most difficult part because I wanted to find a centralised source control where I could connect to from anywhere and hook it with a good ticketing system and wiki to help me organise my work and potentially invite other developers/artists to participate.

After googling for 2 days, I find out two viable solutions: CVSdude and Assembla.

Each come with a trial of 30 days and both are really easy to use and fully functional. After a week, I however decided to use Assembla for one simple reason: proven stability.

Don’t misunderstand me, CVSdude is really great and offers everything you need but I got two small issues that didn’t get solved as fast as I would have liked while I didn’t meet any issue with Assembla. In front of this situation, I therefore decided to use the one that didn’t bring me any problem at all.