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by catalogia 2443 days ago
When I was there, they were migrating away from perforce because they could no longer scale perforce fast enough to meet demand. I've not seen this talked about much outside of Amazon.

It was also a huge day-to-day quality of life improvement for the users (the developers.) There are UX problems with git, but they pale in comparison to the UX problems with perforce which is truly unpleasant software.
1 comments
blandflakes 2442 days ago
The Alexa division migrated aggressively to git as soon as it was available and nobody publicly voiced any regret about losing perforce.
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catalogia 2442 days ago
Several of the people I worked with at Amazon were skeptical of git, at least initially. Some people prefer tools they already know, prefer the routine and habit over learning a new tool. And I totally respect that by the way, git's UX is superior in mainly aesthetic ways, in terms of tactical productivity it's more of a wash. I still think git has the edge, but there is nothing to say a seasoned developer who's used perforce for years isn't being exceptionally productive with it.

Nearly everybody I talked to about it eventually came around to prefer git though. Once you've been forced to swallow the bitter pill of learning something new and changing your workflow, I think the advantages begin to shine through.

On the other hand, maybe I'm just biased because I was proficient in git years before I was ever exposed to perforce. So maybe it was myself who was balking at learning something new, and that's why I was so relieved when my team switched to git. But I do genuinely believe that git has a superior UX.

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blandflakes 2442 days ago
Our team did have the complicating factor that we were doing private builds - which mean that our source code was in a private subversion repository and then perforce was used to track the brazil primitives and private build decryption key stuff.

Once git support was good enough, leadership was very supportive of an en masse exodus.

I also think my team was pretty junior, which meant they'd never actually seen perforce, so as you say, moving to git was going back to something familiar for nearly everybody.

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