Wanted: Version Control Propaganda Video

[tinjaw]

I have a friend who is not using version control and suffering from all that entails. I am looking for a video, or a document/web page, but preferably a video, that you believe would convert a non-believer into a version control user. It is not that they are educated about version control and denounce it as paganism, but they never were shown how it can save their sole and make them rich, and all that before breakfast. I am looking for something that is generic (i.e. software agnostic), educates, and proselytizes version control to the unexposed oblivious coders out there.

Anybody aware of such a useful piece of propaganda?

[hollowlife1987]

A quick version control search on youtube gave me this result
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83QhWZA8XrQ

[justice]

This is a great generic guide that explains all facets of source control with humour / without jargon / and discusses the benefits and best practices, which helped me and my colleague when we looked at converting to svn. It's not a video but I dare anyone to find a better written guide.

http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html

[CWuestefeld]

Not a video, but a promise:

If your friend refuses to version control, no serious development team will hire him, ever. If this is his attitude, he is hard-core unemployable. Heck, I'd say that if I had a way to divine whether a candidate had ever held such a view in the past, it would automatically disqualify them.

I realize you said it's a friend, tinjaw, but at some point gentle reasoning is pointless. I wonder kind of pathology could have given him this attitude, and how it's polluted the rest of his "skills".

[tinjaw]

He's not a programmer. He just wrote something in Visual Basic many years ago and just kept doing more and more until he had a few programs that people purchase from him. He is a one-man shop and will never need to work with another programmer. He has no formal training in the coding profession. No one has ever taken the time to explain to him what version control is, what it does, or why he would want to use it.

[f0dder]

Heck, I'd say that if I had a way to divine whether a candidate had ever held such a view in the past, it would automatically disqualify them.

Why? Learning the error of your ways & accepting you were wrong is a pretty important & valuable attribute to have, imho.

It took me a while to move to version control software... after all, doing automatic incremental RAR archiving of my source partition was easy to set up, and it "worked just fine". Was definitely less work than adopting the new workflows that version control requires.

Obviously, I'd never ever go back to that after I got comfortable with subversion, though.

[CWuestefeld]

Heck, I'd say that if I had a way to divine whether a candidate had ever held such a view in the past, it would automatically disqualify them.

Why? Learning the error of your ways & accepting you were wrong is a pretty important & valuable attribute to have, imho.

You're right. Please let me rephrase:

If a developer, after having been exposed to version control and having received an explanation of its benefits and the risks it addresses, continues to eschew its usage, then it reveals an attitude that I believe will prevent that developer from being a positively contributing member of the team in the long run.

f0dder: it sounds like you were using your own home-grown SCC. It may not have had all the amenities that we expect, but it addressed many of the needs.

[tinjaw]

This is a great generic guide that explains all facets of source control with humour [snip]

So far this is the best one I've seen. I may just ask him to read this. I am afraid that it will look like too much work to read it all. I am looking for something shorter if written that one could read in a few minutes while waiting for something else. IOW, no time investment other than idle time.