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Smoother Deployments

Steve Jones talks about how, at a prior company, he & coworkers simplified their deployment processes and their lives:

The lead developer and I both had little children at the time. Spending 12+ hours at work on Wednesday wasn’t an ideal situation for us, and we decided to get better.

The first thing we did was ensure that all code was tracked in VSS. We had most web code here, but there were always a few files that weren’t captured, so we cleaned that up. I also added database code to VSS with the well known, time tested and proven File | Save, File | Open method of capturing SQL code. This took a few months, and some deployment issues, to get everyone in the habit of modifying code in this manner. I refused to deploy code that wasn’t in VSS, and since our CTO was a former developer, I had support.

The other change was the lead developer and I started building a release branch of code each week. We’d move over the changes that were going to be released to this branch, which simplified our process. We could now see exactly which code was being deployed. This was before git and more modern branching strategies, but we were able to easily copy code from the mainline of development to the release branch as we made changes for this week.

It’s a good read.