At the time I was working on a student project and all I needed was some source control. A project hosting service would provide much more than that, which I didn’t take into account at all. Now when comparing similar services, issues like integrated bugtracking, the type of source control system used and availability of private repositories are much more important to me than they were in my previous review.

Here’s a list of what I want no matter what:

• Private repository (at least one).
• Support for a distributed version control system (Git or Mercurial).
• Integration with a bugtracker.

So the the following are four more project hosting services for anyone who needs an integrated solution with private source control hosting:

Bitbucket

This is my personal favorite. Lately I’ve been reading about distributed version control systems (DVCS), like Mercurial and Git, and growing fond of them. I can say that I switched to using Mercurial for all my personal projects. Bitbucket is a service that gives you unlimited private and public source repositories based on Mercurial, with an integrated bugtracker for free up to 5 users. They also have other pricing plans for larger projects, but this is the best free offer you will find on the market. I’ve been using Bitbucket for a while now and these terms are new, after today they announced they’ve been acquired by Atlassian. Definitively a good bet.

Kiln

A work of FogCreek software, which you’ve probably heard of (Joel Spolsky). Kiln is a system implemented on top of Mercurial, which adds some advanced features (not listed because they are irrelevant in the comparison). One good thing is that it integrates very nicely with FogBugz, a top-notch bugtracking tool. Please note that what I’ve used is the so-called “Student and Startup Edition”, which allows for unlimited space and number of repositories for 2 users. They provide a standalone Kiln client, but any Mercurial client should work (if you want tighter integration with your IDE for example).

Project Locker

Up to 3 projects, 500MB, 5 users – free. That’s their offering. The difference here would be that they offer Subversion and Git hosting, rather than Mercurial. If that’s the type of source control you’d rather use, maybe this is a better option for you. Github might actually be better known, but as of now they don’t offer a private repository for free, and that’s one of my primary concerns. The con I find about Project Locker is their speed and the clumsy and unfriendly web interface. They also only provide TRAC for bugtracking, and put ads on those pages when you browse, which is probably understandable, but still a downside.

Beanstalk

This is what I used before I switched to Project Locker. The two are probably comparable, Beanstalk have a free account for 3 users, 1 private repository and 100MB of space. Subversion and Git are supported, but space is definitely a limiting factor here. The web interface is wonderful compared to Project Locker, but I wouldn’t use this for anything else than a test project simply because of the 100 MB limitation. Please note that they also don’t provide integration with a bugtracking service.

I’ve been researching services similar to the ones above for more than a year or two now, and the ones I mentioned are what I consider the best at the moment. Please share your comments if you’ve used some of them and have any particular impressions or know about another one I probably haven’t heard of. Until the next edition of such a comparison, happy coding.

When you go to the Favorites tab, the current location within the CHM is selected automatically. You only need to click the Add button and it’s added to the (initially empty) list of topics. Next time you open the CHM, just go there and open the topic you last saved. Neat.

Treating all customers the same and treating every customer well is putting a bottom limit on frustration – you can’t go too bad if you do it. Treating customers differently gives you the opportunity to make your best ones love you.

In college I only studied Intro to Marketing for one semester, and it was far from my main focus. What I noticed, though, is that all textbooks and materials tell you that the customer is always right, you should always listen to the customer. Well, not always. Not if this customer makes you spend double the effort on him just to not hate you. Instead, you can devote this time to invent something for the customers that love you. As Seth Godin says, they will talk about you and bring many more after them.

Where I come from, in elementary schools they treat all students the same. They put a bottom limit on quality. They ensure that every student is educated and literate. What they don’t ensure is that schools produce geniuses and achievers. For this to happen, you need to remove the top limit, you need to give students the freedom to explore, the resources and the attention.

In my daily job I sometimes come in contact with customers who always complain about something and want a solution ASAP. They threaten to abandon your product and go to the competition. I say let them go. You have two choices to spend your time – convince them they are wrong and your product is good, or work on the product and make it awesome. You could also work on a program to provide benefits to your VIP customers (the ones who love you). This second choice would be a much better investment than the first one.

This could probably be applied everywhere people are involved – HR, education, communications. Don’t introduce bottom limits. Remove the top limits instead.

UPDATE: Here’s a very good article by Seth Godin that I think relates to this post.

Blogging entered my world about two or three years ago. I remember looking through a book in the student library at AUBG, titled Essential Blogging. I had no idea what the book was about, but looked at what the authors had to say and developed an interest in the topic. I started reading blogs sporadically, not following any of them consistently. Then I found out about RSS and Google Reader. I started filling up the list of my subscriptions and have been reading continuously since then.

I entered the blogging world about a year ago. Blogging was so cool that there was just no way I wasn’t having a blog. So I started one on blogspot.com and posted some student life stuff that no one cared about, including me. This effort failed miserably and I stopped writing, deciding to be quiet until I have something meaningful to share with the world. The next step was when I started a Bulgarian blog with a friend of mine. The goal was to post only humorous and meaningless content, probably in order to be cool.

All this time I was trying to figure out what is the purpose of my blogging and what I want to achieve with it. I started using hosted solutions at first, then read some more about optimizations and interesting things you could do with a self-hosted blog. I did that for both Naliven Bozdugan and the one you are reading right now, changed the templates, included categorization features and bookmarking. But until recently, I had no idea where I’m going and only blogged because I liked it.

Yesterday, thinking about what is the next step that I should take (for this blog), I came to the conclusion I’d been searching. It might have been Seth Godin that brought this to my mind, it might have been Dimitar Nikolov, I’m not sure. But what I realized is that I want to take a stand on issues. I blog, because I need to express my opinion, my mood and my feelings. I need to know what my opinion is. The thing is, a lot less people are interested in me as a person than I wish. So the only thing that would make someone drop by and read what I have to say is my opinion. I saw in this an opportunity to find the person I want to become through writing. There is nothing wrong with blogging about a problem I’m not sure how to solve, just the opposite – I think that writing about uncertainty and controversy would be helpful in making a decision or finding an answer to a question.

The end result of all this would hopefully be a clearer mind for myself, and more interesting content for you. I don’t want to make predictions about how it will turn out, let’s just hope that I am right and everything goes as planned.

Oh, and I need a logo for this blog, but I don’t have any graphic design skills. I also don’t know what would be the general idea of the logo and I haven’t written enough content to be able to tell from that. Ideas are welcome.

I wish we had more stations like this in public places. Could this be a viable business model, or is it worthless, having in mind the efforts put into standardizing mobile phone chargers?

Anyway, installing programs has always been one of the worst experiences ever while setting up my work/fun environment, on any platform. Linux makes it easy for you to install distribution packages, but I still haven’t spend the time to figure out how to uninstall them. What happens to all dependencies that you didn’t note down when installing? Do they remain in the system?

Since program installation is usually the first impression that software makes in a user, I think every software developer should spend the time and make it as perfect as it can be. This is clearly not only my opinion, but in this post I wanted to mention two features of software installations in general that I find wonderful, and cannot figure out why there are people that miss to put them in.

1. “Don’t create a Start Menu folder” option

2. “Create a Desktop icon” and “Create a Quick Launch icon”

First, I have so many things in the Windows Start Menu, that I probably never open it. I don’t need more things there by default, and I need an option to control this when installing software. Second, I extensively use the Quick Launch toolbar, and if the installer puts an icon there for me, that would be great. Obviously the FeedDemon installer made me happy and the people from NewsGator did their job. Why don’t the others do it? Why don’t you do it every time?

Are you using Google Chrome? A while ago I talked about how this browser’s introduction into the market would affect the other players. I don’t know what’s the situation today, I only know they released a final 1.0 version and are out of beta. For me, the speed and user experience that I have in this new browser is unmatched. The only reason keeping me from making it my default are Firefox’s plugins. I guess once Chrome introduces a plugin system, they would have to sacrifice a lot of the performance benefits. Similar to what happened to Firefox. With one exception: we’re talking Google this time, not Mozilla. And probably most of you know that once Google decides to do something (another innovative way to try and rule the web), they don’t stop no matter what.

In short I’m saying Google have far more power and willingness to contribute to their browser than Mozilla had. But this is not why I started this post. I started it to share a really cool Javascript experience that these guys announced a while ago. They are exploring the nuts and bolts of the V8 framework used in Chrome to create wonderful applications. Here’s the site (make sure to open it with Chrome):

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

And then some people say Javascript was dead and the future would belong to rich applications (to read: Flash and Silverlight). I so disagree.

Now the question is, are Google really spamming people, or their Spam filters are just a bit more than good?

A stupid question, I know. Especially after you are already reading this. But I’m fascinated about the fact that so many people I know still don’t read blogs on a regular basis or don’t use RSS or Atom or some other publishing protocol reader. For me, blogs are the primary way to stay informed about what’s happening in my communities, and the main news channel. They are also the easiest way for me to chill out and relax for a minute between two tasks requiring high concentration. A personal opinion on a topic is much more valuable than the 20-times-edited newspage on cnn.com or any other mass news site.

So, since I’m so passionate about this, what blogs do I read? Well, this post is an attempt to summarize a fraction of my Google Reader subscriptions, with explanations of why I read them. Hopefully this would shed some light on the topics I’m mostly interested in nowadays, too. Here’s the list:

47 Hats – Bob Walsh’s advice for independent software vendors (MicroISVs) and startups. Digests of news about the community, events and nice articles from all around.

A Smart Bear – Tagline: Startups + Marketing + Geekery. Jason Cohen, an entrepreneur and his takes on small business

Erik Sink – The definitive guide to the Business of Software.

Hacker News – This is a site that Paul Graham set up to get together a community of developers and provoke discussion about the things shared in the dev community in general. Something like reddit.com/r/programming.

How to Change the World – Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist, currently a venture capitalist, blogging about entrepreneurship, providing tips and tricks.

Joel on Software – One of THE bloggers in the software development community. Former Microsoftie, currently owner of Fog Creek Software, doesn’t write much lately. Launched a developer community site together with Atwood called Stackoverflow. Rare but quality material.

Paul Graham – An angel investor in Silicon Valley. Created the Y Combinator project, writing very valuable essays on investment, especially VC and Angel. See Hacker News.

Seth Godin – the marketing guy. Top marketing blog. Ever.

Friday Reflections – a new storyline and a new thought each Friday. Author is Anand Shah. Unbelievably inspirational.

Coding Horror – comparable to Joel in software development. Jeff Atwood, Joel’s partner in Stackoveflow, again writing for devs. See Joel on Software.

Scott Hanselman – another prominent software development blogger. Lots of info, primary Microsoft.

Scott Gu – The Gu, Scott Guthrie, running the following dev teams in Microsoft – CLR and core .NET libraries, ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS 7, Visual Studio Tools for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and mobile. A must read for every Microsoft dev.

I can say I only listed the MUST ones. Except for those, I’m following about 97 more. Anyone who wants the full list, just drop a line. So what are you waiting for? Publish your list and let me know. What blogs are YOU reading?