Presenting on Trunk-based Development at the Perforce MERGE Conference

this was a month ago at perforce’s merge 2014 conference, but the videos are up now, so you can watch it too:

trunk-based development in the enterprise, its relevance and economics

of many case studies that i have, i detailed one where a hedge-bet on the order of releases paid off. not that the client knew they were hedge-betting at the outset, that’s just the reality of trunk based development , feature toggles / build switches, and branch by abstraction . perhaps application strangulation too.

i couldn’t name the client, but they have many billions of dollars of revenue through the web-app in question.

for those with adhd, the ppt is there too, and you can get through that in about 60 seconds if you do 2 seconds per slide!

other presentations from merge you should watch.

if you’re spending the time on merge materials, some are trunk based development related, some are pure scale related (some both). i also have a “novel use” interest where vcs is the back-end, and a subset are listed below.

working well together: how to keep high-end game development teams productive

presenter – frank compagner, guerilla games – a sony subsidiary. link to presentation .

their head revision of trunk is 1.8 tb (1.6 million files), which the don’t subset when they checkout to a developer workstation.

if i pasted everything of value from frank’s presentation, i’d have every slide in here. of his soundbites, one that i tweeted was gold:

“branches create distance between developers and we don’t wan’t that”

what continuous delivery means for version control

jez humble’s presentation is always going to be the keynote for enterprise people. jez and i had a minor struggle before the conference to make out presentations not overlap too much. i think we did ok. link to presentation

adidas’ digital platform for high performance creativity

presenters: alja ter burg (adidas) and jithin chacko (mindtree). link to presentation

version control in a designers workflow. not web-developer / ux style designers, those that make shoes! alja ter burg speaks first on the addidas story and context up to the creation of a custom tool. jithin chacko follows with the “what we made” part of the story.

a great soundbite from jithin:

“our users are usually right brained people who don’t care if it is a versioning system or a file sharing system, they just want it to stay out of their way”

version your cloud: using perforce to manage your object storage

presenter: daniel anolik, jeppesen, a boeing company. link to presentation

daniel details their novel use of perforce to manage data for client applications, and end-users.

bdam: big data asset management

mark harrison & mike sundy of pixar

the listing from the agenda

sadly, this was a “camera’s off” moment at merge. the amount of stuff these folks have under version control is truly incredible . if someone could leak their cameraphone footage to the web, i’d be so pleased – it was almost criminal that it wasn’t released. if it is only the clips from toy story and monsters inc (etc) that was verboten, can we get those rectangles redacted please guys?

similarly doug quist’s nvidia usage was eye opening , not from the conference as such, but doug was there.