Can more than one programmer work on different areas of the same website?

mwildman

Hi everyone,

We have a website that needs a number of 'fixes' to be done very quickly. We have one php programmer we like and trust working on it, but we need the fixes to go much faster and he does not have enough time to work on it.

Can we hire one or two more php programmers to work on the fixes, and if yes, how do we make sure they do not overwrite or mess up each other's code?

Thank you for any insight you can provide.

M. Wildman :bemused:

bradgrafelman

One way would be to use some sort of SCM/VCS which, among many other benefits, should allow developers to work in parallel and safely identify (and complete) areas were two or more changes overlapped and a merge (or rebase) needs to occur.

My personal SCM/VCS of choice (largely influenced by the fact I use it at work) is Git.

mwildman

bradgrafelman;11042311 wrote:
One way would be to use some sort of SCM/VCS which, among many other benefits, should allow developers to work in parallel and safely identify (and complete) areas were two or more changes overlapped and a merge (or rebase) needs to occur.

My personal SCM/VCS of choice (largely influenced by the fact I use it at work) is Git.

Thank you - we will give that a try. Much appreciated!

sneakyimp

As I understand it, Git is what they use for the linux kernel. It takes some figuring out to get fluent with it. SVN is another good one but I think it always requires a server to host the code repository.

You might also consider assigning each programmer a different folder to work in -- but this may not be possible depending on the way your project is constructed.

In any case, COMMUNICATION is critically important. Using a version control system doesn't change that.

laserlight

If you are only going to have 3 programmers working on the code (i.e., 4 users including yourself), then you could go with Bitbucket to host a private Git repository for free. Alternatively, you can just host it on a server somewhere, but then you may have to consider things like user accounts and permissions. If you do not already have your own issue tracker, then the lightweight one in Bitbucket might suffice. As sneakyimp noted, the idea here is communication, and these tools are meant to facilitate that, not replace it.

sneakyimp wrote:
SVN is another good one but I think it always requires a server to host the code repository.

In practice for teams there's usually a "blessed" repository hosted on a server even when distributed version control systems are used, so it isn't actually a disadvantage for Subversion. What would be a disadvantage is that if the central server is down, you may be screwed until it goes back online, whereas with a distributed version control system like Git life can go on.

sneakyimp

Assembla.com also offers some version control services.