p4blog is Moving
Posted on Jan 5, 2012 by Ellen Trieu
Hello p4blog fans,
p4blog is moving to a new url and it is quite snazzy! p4blog is now directly connected to the main Perforce website which allows for a seamless flow of information on our products and events. Come test drive the new layout, easy to navigate categories and more.
Visit the new home of p4blog now and don’t forget to update your rss feed so you can get the latest p4blog post in your content reader.
Thanks again for your support of the p4blog. See you on the other side!
p4blog Team
Interview with Perforce Sales Partner Tony Mower
Posted on Jan 4, 2012 by Brigid Kilcoin
Tony Mowers With Baby Alex
Tony Mowers was born in Toronto, Canada in 1965. He graduated in 1989 from the University of Waterloo, Canada with a degree in Applied Mathematics. From 1989 to present, he has worked as a software architect, team lead, and software engineering team coach. In 1995 he founded his own engineering company in Berkeley, California and now operates it as Alika AG in Switzerland. He is also a member of the EVOCEAN GmbH team. EVOCEAN is Perforce’s sales partner in Switzerland.
Have you lived in Switzerland all your life? If not, how did you end up there?
I’ve been living in Switzerland for about 6 years now. I am a Canadian, born and raised in Canada, but I lived and worked in California for about 10 years. While there, I met my future wife at a sailing club. We married, and then I followed her back to her Swiss homeland.
What prompted your company to partner with Perforce?
Our company, EVOCEAN, believes that there is a good growth opportunity here for Perforce in Switzerland. I used Perforce for several projects back when I worked in California, and I came to think that Perforce is the best enterprise-class version control system in the market. Perforce is not as well-known here as it should be, so I liked the idea of becoming a sales partner and promoting its use.
What’s your favorite way to waste time online?
I am an addict for learning new things, and I love watching “how-to” videos. In particular, I’ve been known to watch hours of videos on furniture making from websites such as Fine Woodworking or The Wood Whisperer. What I like about furniture making is how the focus is on quality and the careful development of techniques. If I am lucky, the end product is beautiful, and it is something people will appreciate long after I’m gone.
What would you improve about Perforce?
I’d like some sort of graphical administration tool that would walk the administrator through setting up a backup strategy for their Perforce installation. I’d like that tool to help the administrator do a trial restore from one of the backups.
What do you do at your job? What does being a Perforce Sales Partner entail?
EVOCEAN helps development teams improve how they build software, applications, and products. My contribution is based on 25 years of experience as a software engineer. For most clients, I join their project team, help them identify areas of improvement and then assist in those areas. The tasks can range from helping with product management to programming. Our company’s focus is on continuous improvement, methods, training and change management. Good tools, such as Perforce, facilitate this focus.
As a Perforce Sales partner, our first task is to learn about the configuration management needs of our potential clients. So the relationship starts with us asking questions and listening closely to the answers. We can then help them evaluate Perforce more quickly and more fully than they could without our help. We demonstrate the product, explain the relevant features and find relevant experts for them to talk too.
Where is your favorite place to bike?
What I like about biking is exploring by bike. Recently, I’ve been exploring the Jura region of Switzerland. It’s in the northern part of Switzerland, where Switzerland meets France. It’s a hilly region with lots of quiet back roads and farms. It’s not as famous as the Alps, but it still has world-class cycling.
What’s your favorite food?
Lately, I’ve had cravings for Ethiopian food. I miss the Ethiopian restaurants that my wife and I ate at in Berkeley.
What was the biggest thing you learned from reading the resource manual “Practical Perforce”?
The book’s description of the “main line” strategy for code management was very good. The mantra “merge down, copy up,” is something that’ll stick in my head. It was also presented in a relatively tool-neutral manner.
What do you do for fun after work?
My after-work hobbies include looking after my three-year-old son, biking, sailing and trying to learn to build wooden furniture.
What advice would you give someone considering Perforce?
Watch one or more of the short “getting started” videos on the Perforce website. Download Perforce. Try it out.
I think that Perforce is the easiest versioning product to install and start using. The visual P4V client comes with the installation package and it’s an impressive visual client.
What is the biggest misconception others have about your field?
People tend to think that my field is all about computers. It is really more about people; in my experience, technologies are seldom the source of difficulties in projects.
Set Transparency to Open!
Posted on Dec 29, 2011 by Patrick McGarry
You can hardly throw a rock these days without hitting a company talking about how they are “embracing social media in news ways.” As more and more companies talk about “engagement” and “going viral” there is too often one piece of the puzzle that goes completely overlooked…”transparency.” Transparency is a concept that is either overlooked or misunderstood when it comes to corporate outreach and continues to be one of the driving reasons behind lack of adoption by a savvy community.
Transparency is the concept that being open and honest in order to involve your community directly in what you are doing is more important than an outmoded idea that your every brainstorm is a corporate secret waiting to be pilfered. These days ideas are rarely the commodity that becomes valuable (with obvious exceptions), it is the implementation and constant gardening surrounding those ideas that is valuable. The difficulty is finding a good balance between allowing customers to see the vibrant personalities involved in creating your business without subjecting them to the day-to-day dirty laundry that exists in every company no matter how large or small.
The Little Ice Rink’s Big Day
Posted on Dec 27, 2011 by Alexandra Weber Morales
The sun glinted on the virgin ice. Christopher Seiwald, founder and president of Perforce, stepped out with a microphone and addressed a crowd that stood around the perimeter of the Little Ice Rink at the corner of Park and Tilden Way. Seiwald began with a a few words describing how Park Street has been a hub for his 15-year-old company, founded in Alameda: “We started out down by South Shore, then moved up Park Street in a couple of buildings, and now we’re across the way on Blanding. It’s been a dream of ours for a few years to have an ice rink in Alameda. Thanks to the Perforce Foundation we were able to make it possible in record time.”
Then Seiwald invited Alameda Mayor Marie Gilmore to join him on to the ice. “We are very fortunate to have one company giving back to the community the way Perforce is. What a way for Perforce to give Alameda a Christmas gift of this Little Ice Rink,” said Gilmore.
The grand opening on December 16 was that dream made real, and the location at the former Good Chevrolet lot on Park Street was indeed fortuitous. Cars slowed to watch and with each passing minute, dozens more people approached, curious or raring to skate.
Mobile Development: Writing Code on an iPad, for an iPad
Posted on Dec 20, 2011 by James Creasy
Over the Thanksgiving break, I had the chance to try writing software using my iPad. I first mentioned Perforce’s interest in development and SCM on mobile devices in a blog post last May called “What’s Coming: New Horizons”. I figured it was time to put my money where my mouth is and give it a try.
In this case the money was for a $7.99 app called Codea (http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/). For that price, I got an IDE using the Lua programming language and access to a few basic features of the iPad. It’s a limited environment, and writing code was awkward, but the bottom line was for me was: this was the most fun I’ve ever had with the iPad.
Novelty and Nostalgia
Part of the fun was the novelty of coding on a touch screen device. Some interesting enhancements made the coding experience unique in my experience.
For example, if you type a function that takes a color argument, touching the parentheses for the function brings up a (wonderfully direct) color ring for color selection. Despite some creative enhancements to the editing environment, typing all the special characters used in programming tended towards tedious. Particularly challenging was cursor placement. However, for these tiny programs, the difficulty typing turned out to be beneficial because it caused me to “think twice and code one”, which made for better results.
Perforce and Eclipse: The Best of Both Worlds
Posted on Dec 14, 2011 by Liz Lam
There are many joys that come with being in the software industry. When you’ve been in it for a little while it’s easy to forget that not every profession enjoys the same sort of perks we have. Obviously, these perks differ from company to company. One of the things I love about working for Perforce is the investment it makes in me by allowing me to attend trainings and conferences. In turn, I hope to be a better employee by applying some of the things I’ve learned in my everyday work.
Most recently, I attended Eclipse Day at Google. It was a fun packed day of great sessions on what people are doing with Eclipse. The first talk I attended was about building the Google plug-in. An interesting “take away” from that was the confirmation to “blend in naturally.” It’s important to not take over the IDE, but to “plug-in” in a natural and Eclipse way. As the P4Eclipse QA Engineer, I try to keep this in mind as I test out new features and the designs of them.
Another highlight was Ketan Padegaonkar’s talk on SWTBot. I was especially interested in this session because we started using this automation framework a year and a half ago and was eager to gain any insights. At one point, someone from the audience asked if the project will ever come out of incubation. Without hesitation, Ketan responds “No.” He then later explains that this project was done on top of a 60 hour work week. As a QA Engineer, this really struck a chord with me. It’s so awesome to know that there are folks in the open source community that care about making tools for testing.
These are just a couple of the excellent sessions I attended. As I continue to work for Perforce, I am thankful for the “double perk” I receive as the P4Eclipse QA Engineer. I have the privilege of being employed by a company that doesn’t think it’s wasteful to send a tester to a developer’s conference and the opportunity to work with a community that cares about us.
Partner of the Month: Downsized Games
Posted on Dec 12, 2011 by Randall DeFauw
This series of articles highlights Perforce’s integration and technology partners. Expect to see future article in this series about once a month.
Background
Downsized Games makes P4U, a Perforce plugin for Unity3D.
Tell us a little bit about your company and your products
Downsized Games was founded by four ex- Pandemic Studio employees, who were perfectly happy with their lives until their studio was shut down. Instead of lying down and taking it, they seized the opportunity to create games the way they always wanted: fun and fast.
Perforce Plugin for Unity3D
What benefits do we get from integrating your product with Perforce? Describe any key technical challenges that are solved.
Unity3D is a fantastic game development tool but it lacks an integrated version control interface.
Who would benefit most from using your product with Perforce? Developers, product managers, administrators?
Developers, specifically artists will now have an integrated interface with industry standard version control.
Underused Awesomeness
Posted on Dec 9, 2011 by Mark Warren
I recently came across an interesting Perforce-related blog posting by Bruce Dawson (“Source Indexing Is Underused Awesomeness“). In his article he describes how indexing source code can be an extremely powerful debugging aid, especially when you’re debugging builds made on some remote machine, however it’s rarely used. Source indexing is one of the gazillions of features added to Visual Studio over its long history yet rarely understood or used by most programmers. His article details a nice solution to enable source indexing for source code held in the Perforce depot.
I think it would be unfair to call a relatively rarely used feature like this “bloatware” but I’m sure we can all think of software tools where a large proportion (the majority even?) of functions are hardly ever used. Joel Spolsky argues that it follows the common 80/20 rule – 80% of the users use only 20% of the functionality. Critically, though, it’s not the same 20% of functions for all 80% of users. His article is somewhat “mature” now (incredibly it’s 10 years since it was written!) but the economic arguments are much the same – hardware costs have continued to decline rapidly (good old Moore’s Law) so the cost of adding more features gets less and less.
Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP
Posted on Dec 7, 2011 by Bryan Pendleton
This year marks the 25th anniversary of an event that was once known to all computing enthusiasts, but nowadays is just a dim memory: the NSFnet “congestion collapse”. The collapse was actually not a single incident, but rather a period of time during which the network was so saturated with re-transmission requests that almost no actual content was successfully being transferred across the net.
Reflecting on the event many years later, Professor Dave Mills, who wrote much of the software in the early routers of the Internet, recalled:
The NSFnet routers ran my code, which was horribly overrun by supercomputer traffic. I found the best way to deal with the problem was to find the supercomputer elephants and shoot them. [ ... ]
The NSFnet meltdown occured primarily because the fuzzball routers used smart interfaces that retransmitted when either an error occured or the receiver ran dry of buffers. The entire network locked up for a time because all the buffers in all six machines filled up with retransmit traffic and nothing could get in or out.
If you’re wondering what a “fuzzball router” is, you can read more about it here; essentially, it was a package of software that turned a DEC PDP-11 into a node on the Internet.
Girl Geeks Take Over the Perfortress
Posted on Dec 6, 2011 by Natalie Estrada
Last Thursday, over 200 geeks from around the Bay Area partied and networked at the Perfortress for the 14th Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner – it was an electric night of new connections and girl geeky-ness! We ate Pad Thai out of pink Chinese food boxes, drank the new Perforce signature drink – the P4D-lish! – and ate pink and purple candy off of the candy bar. The photo booth hosted by HR was busy all night and there was major interest in all of the open positions.
P4D-lish Cocktail Recipe
1 part Absolut Citron
1 part Cran-Pomegranate Juice
1 part Lemonade
1 part Sparking Water
Combine and serve over ice with a raspberry garnish!
Besides drinking, eating, and getting cool swag, everyone learned something new. Kathy Baldanza, Perforce VP of Engineering spoke about the history of Perforce, the importance of versioning, why we believe in giving back, and the life-altering effect mentors can have (“If you can’t find one, be one”). Girl geeks from Perforce shared moments they realized they were girl geeks (more about this on Dorthy Santos’ blog) and Laurette Cisneros (Build & Release Manager) folllowed up by sharing about the Perforce Foundation.
