<p>I’ve mentioned before that I prefer <a href="https://www.mercurial-scm.org/">Mercurial</a> to <a href="https://git-scm.com/">Git</a>, at least for my own work. That said, git has a nice feature that allows you to cherry pick revisions to merge between branches. That’s extremely useful if you want to move a single change between branches and not do a full branch merge. Turns out mercurial has that ability, too, but it goes by a slightly different name.</p>

<p>It might sound paradoxical, but in general, writing more code is easier than writing less code that accomplishes the same goals. Even if your code starts out clean, compact and beautiful, the code that is added later to cover the corner cases nobody thought of usually takes care of the code being well designed, elegant and beautiful. Agile programming offers a solution, namely constant refactoring, but who has time for that? That’s why I occasionally give myself the 10% code reduction…

<p>I’ve blogged about <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2014/03/12/improving-the-performance-of-git-for-windows/">improving the performance of Git on Windows</a> in the past and rightly labelled the suggested solution as a bad hack because it requires you to manually replace binaries that are part of the installation. For people who tend to use DVCSs from the command line, manually replacing binaries is unlikely to be a big deal but it’s clunky and should really be a wakeup…

<p>Over on <a href="http://bitbashing.io/">bitbashing.io</a>, Matt Kline has an interesting blog post on how <a href="http://bitbashing.io/2015/02/16/shipping-culture.html">Shipping Culture is hurting us</a> as an industry. Hop over there and read it now, because he addresses another case of the pendulum having swung too far. Your developers take a long time to get a new version out? I know, let’s make them ship something half baked. Quality is overrated anyway. Especially when you…

<p>I encounter this on a fairly regular basis - a project uses a third-party library and there is either a bug in the library that we can’t seem to avoid hitting, or there’s a feature missing or not 100% ideal for our use case.</p>