Title: Why We’re Still Using SVN? It’s 2009 After All!

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August 31, 2009. I can hardly believe it’s been a decade since the iPhone SDK was just a whisper and GitHub was still nothing more than a dream in the minds of its creators. The tech world is buzzing with excitement for cloud services like AWS EC2 and S3, and Hadoop seems to be taking off as everyone looks for ways to process big data. Git adoption has been spreading fast, but SVN is still king in our office.

It’s 2009, and we’re still using Subversion (SVN) religiously. Our development team of about ten engineers uses it for all our projects, and while it works, there are times when I wonder if we should consider a switch to Git. The cloud debates rage on, but in my small corner of the tech world, everyone is busy trying to figure out how to get more from their local infrastructure.

One recent Saturday, I was sitting at my desk trying to merge a change from our latest feature branch into the main trunk. It’s not exactly rocket science, but SVN’s merge tool can be quite frustrating. I spent an hour trying to resolve conflicts and finally got it working, only to realize that I needed to do this for every single developer on our team. The thought of merging changes across multiple branches made my head spin.

Then there’s the matter of backups. While we have a solid infrastructure in place, the old adage “if you’re not backing up your data, you’re not doing it right” still rings true. SVN doesn’t offer the same level of versioning and branching flexibility that Git does, making it harder to create robust backup strategies.

On a lighter note, I had an interesting discussion with one of our lead developers about the future of version control systems. He was all for sticking with SVN because he found it easier to use and thought that Git might be too complex for some of our newer team members. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the idea. In 2009, Git had just surpassed 1500 stars on GitHub, yet people were still debating its adoption.

The economic crash was hitting hard, and budget cuts meant fewer resources for tools like Git. But that didn’t stop me from thinking about the benefits of using a more modern version control system. I started researching and realized that while SVN served us well enough, it wasn’t ideal for our growing team.

At night, as I lay in bed, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that we were clinging to old habits too long. Transitioning to Git would require significant effort, but it could streamline our development process and make collaboration easier. The irony is not lost on me—just like everyone else in tech, we’re still using SVN because of inertia.

In the end, I decided to start a side project: converting one of our smaller projects from SVN to Git. It was small, but it would allow us to test out the waters and see if it was worth making the switch for the whole team. The first few days were rough—Git’s steep learning curve didn’t make it easy—but by the end of the week, I felt more confident in its capabilities.

As August draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the challenges we face as engineers. We’re using tools that are a decade old, and while they work, they could be so much better. The tech world moves fast, but sometimes change is hard, especially when you have a lot of legacy code to worry about.

So here’s to 2009, a year filled with excitement and uncertainty. And here’s to the challenges we face as we try to keep up with an ever-evolving industry. Maybe in another ten years, I’ll look back at this moment and laugh at how stubbornly we stuck with SVN.

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That’s where I stood on August 31, 2009—fighting the good fight against old habits and looking forward to what might come next.