Coming up: Two exams, one being extremely important for next academic year. While being busy with other, more interesting things, I kinda forgot about it, ending up with a bit of stressful period. The one day I’m able to tear out 12 hours of studying, the next I’m just too easily distracted. This day, is of the latter kind, as you can see.

I have made some decisions since the last time I wrote up a piece here. First off, I’ve decided to finish my bachelor pursuing high grades so I can basically pick out my favourite university to enjoy my masters at. Second, I definitely want to get on going with a Computer Science degree after that so I’d be able to put my management skills to use in a tech oriented, cutting-edge environment. Third, after not being concerned with my weight and health for a year, I decided to get on the move again, and after making a stupid bet I’m now training to beat my brother at the local 10 kilometers running competition in a time around 35:00 mins (too bad for me, my brother is rather good at this). This event is planned to take place in 9 months, which basically means that I’m already training like 30-40 km a week. Losing the pounds as I speak, finally getting in shape again.

Fourth..next to my work-for-hire life-style, I took an additional job that is not situated around tech and computers at all! It is all concerned with headhunting my fellow students for a staffing agency in order to get them (temporarily) employed at firms where they should fit in perfectly according to their study and general interests. I’m quite excited to be working for ‘LinQ‘, as it allows me to make a difference in people’s lives. It’s really a ‘young and dynamic’ company, and I feel that I fit right in.

And that ends the enumeration. I’ll be flying off to the Spanish Costa Brava in a week for a 10 day period, and when coming back, I’ve got a few days to recover, do my laundry and say bye to my closest relatives, as I’m planning to fly out to Florida to work a month at Artificial Studios in order to get their hardware and organization prepared for the expansion they are planning (growing from a 20-member staff to over 50!). This work needs to be done on-site, and will be the first time in my life that I visit Gainesville, Florida. Rather excited about it!

And now I’m off for some running. Seven kilometers lie ahead.

As I’ve set-up and maintained various Subversion multi-gigabyte repositories over the past years for Artificial Studios and other software developers, I became interested in revision control systems and how they are put to use in the software engineering industry. As you may know, you can distuingish them in two types; the centralized ones, and the distributed. More and more open source projects are switching to the distributed type as it has several advantages. I can envision Artificial Studios working with the distributed type as well, but I was thinking of some advantages of a centralized server, recently. For one, you always know who is working on what through the locks they own. When working with a lot of binary files like designers do, or in this case, game developers, it is essential to know that you cannot work on a binary file as a merge is impossible. As you see, a centralized server can be of really good use here as it automates the process.

Tools like LaunchPad make it easier to manage projects when using either a distributed or centralized revision control system. Tasks (called ‘Blueprints’) are raised, and they describe a certain feature or technique that, according to whom it is proposed by, should be added to the software. Then, the ones managing the project consider it and if approved, it is assigned to the one who’s most suitable for executing the task.

Now this system is not very different from old-school project management software. A task is added and assigned, at that’s it. People can discuss the task on its own whiteboard and mark its progress. Not very new, as you see.

Let’s envision a centralized revision control system and you want to know who’s working on what. In Subversion you can just list the locks and there you have it. This information can easily be marked up in a webpage and tada, you’d have real-time task tracking in your webbrowser. This can of course be further extended. Let’s say you log in to this webpage and add a task. Then, you add certain files to it, which are present in the RVS’ tree or branch (or vice versa, add the file and add the task later on). Everytime when a new changeset of this file is created, the webapp assumes you have made progress. When you log in to the webapp you are prompted to add a small report to the new revision set, which could hold a lot more data than the changelog, adding tools for a project manager to track tasks and progress.

You see where I am going; Project management software integrated with a revision control system. This would require a centralized server as I described, and as a revision control system contains certain information which we can put to use in project management software, it could make project management more straightforward and more efficient as it requires less verbal, direct communication. Moreover, the real-time tracking aspect doesn’t sound that bad either.

Currently, I am writing up a design document for such a piece of software. If you are interested in collaborating, please let me know. If you like to provide input in how you would like to see such software operate within your development environment, I’m open to your suggestions.

So here I am, starting my own blog. I was at this point about a year ago, but eventually decided to hold off. I don’t really recall the reasons for it, but it doesn’t matter anymore.

The reason why I am starting now, is because I’m getting all these entrepreneurial ideas more frequently and I want to archive them and ideally, get some feedback on them. While my general interests are centered around technology, I’m on my way of earning my bachelor’s degree on business. I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur for all my live at that is exactly the goal I’m focusing on. The objective is to be innovative, by introducing products and services that actually change our lives in some way. I’d like to make at least one change before I turn 28..and that’s less than a decade from now. Better get started!