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Ah source control, if there’s a more essential tool which indiscriminately spans programming languages without favour, I’m yet to see it. It’s an essential component of how so many of us work; the lifeblood of many development teams, if you like. So why do we often get it so wrong? Why are some of the really core, fundamentals of version control systems often so poorly understood?

I boil it down to 10 practices – or “commandments” if you like – which often break down or are not properly understand to begin with. These are all relevant to version control products of all types and programming languages of all flavours. I’ll pick some examples from Subversion and .NET but they’re broadly applicable to other technologies.

I’ve been using git for about 18 months now and thought I knew it pretty well. Then we had Scott Chacon from GitHub over to do some training at LVS, a supplier/developer of betting/gaming software (where I’m currently contracting) and I learnt a ton in the first day.

As someone who’s always felt fairly comfortable in Git, I thought sharing some of the nuggets I learnt with the community might help someone to find an answer without needing to do lots of research.