• Easy to use – shouldn’t get in the way of the developer
• View previous revisions – when something isn’t right you need to see how you got to that point
• Simple branching, tagging and merging abilities
• A server component for remote storage – a must for multi-member team development, but still very nice for ever a single developer

I have been using Subversion for version control for the last six years because it accomplished all the goals above. I wasn’t in the market for a new VCS when I happened upon Git and got excited again about version control.

I discovered Git through a coding community website called github. I started noticing that all the open source projects I followed and many of the new ones I stumbled upon were publicly sharing their source through github. github adds a social aspect to code development – it’s kind of like Facebook for developers – and as the name implies is centered around Git. Because of github, Git suddenly became cool and I had to switch.

After reading a few tutorials and getting the basics of Git down I saw the real power of switching to Git. Git makes branching and merging even easier than any of the other VCS I have used before. Even though I think backing code off your development machine is very important, I like that with Git you can create local branches without pushing those changes to the origin server. Fixing bugs and developing new code in their own branch is a best practice that is not often followed (at least by me) because of the steps involved – with Git those steps are too simple not to follow.

I still haven’t switched all my projects over to Git. I am mainly using Git for new projects. I still use SVN for Swap-bot, but as I become more familiar with Git I look forward to making the switch.

Swap-bot.com is a community site that enables users to trade handmade crafts through the postal mail. I started the site with Rachel a few years ago. After four years of reliable service, we have outgrown most single-host solutions.

At its core, Swap-bot is a PHP/MySQL application – it’s really just a basic LAMP application.

A few months ago I started to realize that one server wasn’t enough.  I wanted to load balance my webserver and beef up my database server. I also wanted to have freedom to control which packages get installed on my servers.

After some research and setup, Swap-bot now run an nginx load balancer on top of two apache webservers. I also have a mysql server with plenty of memory that I now run memcached, a sphinx search server and my mail server from. In addition to the production servers, I have one administration host that is used as a subversion repository host and a yum/rpmbuild host. I also have a development machine that exactly matches production and another host used for various blogs and small sites.

In future posts I will go into depth on each specific piece with the goal of hopefully helping someone out and better documenting what I have done for my own future reference.