[dholowiski]

I've always been a hobby programmer, but over the last few months I've been developing some web sites and trying to bring my skills up 'to the next level'. The things you mentioned- vcs, bug tracking, deployment- are definitely non trivial. Partly because while most programming languages are well documented and have lots of tutorials, the things you mention are almost a black art, something every programmer does a bit differently (I think) and rolls their own scripts.

For example- there is a php project I want to contribute to with bug fixes. I can fix the bugs no problem, but submitting a patch & using the bug tracking system? Way beyond me!

[wisty]

VCS and bug tracking are not difficult. You can get it all by just installing fossil. If that's not your thing, you can install tortise hg (on Windows) or some other dvcs and get started in next to no time.

Deployment is definetly ugly. There's stuff like pip, fabric, and virtual-env (all on python) which are meant to ease the pain ... but the fact that agile geeks reccomend 3 different frameworks just to make things simpler show how ugly it is. I don't know what the cool kids use for PhP though.