[oneplusone]

Before you write your first line of code.

[olefoo]

I'm probably not the only person on here who keeps any notes and planning documents for projects under version control. I also regularly import research notes into comments before I write the code in question, but I'm weird and I've been told I do too much design up front.

[keefe]

I'm firmly of the opinion that only 10% of writing software is typing code. I have all my text documents in git, experimental ideas, budget plans, everything. The only complaint I have is that I haven't figure a solid plan for doing encryption inside version control effectively yet, but I haven't tried too hard either.

[olefoo]

Whole volume encryption works, although it can be a bit cumbersome.

[keefe]

How is the performance? I have no experience with whole volume encryption, do you have any useful links?

[olefoo]

There are actually several ways to do this I use encfs which uses FUSE to mount an encrypted directory as another directory, the advantages are that it works in userland and it's braindead simple. I wouldn't want to run a database off of it, but for a bunch of text files it's perfectly adequate. A lot of people are fans of truecrypt and if you are seriously concerned about devoted efforts to get at high-value data you probably want to just encrypt the disk partition you are using.

This post http://www.debianadmin.com/filesystem-encryption-tools-for-l... has a fairly good introduction to the most popular flavours. It's going to vary depending on your needs.

[keefe]

Thanks for the article, there is lots of great info on there. I need to figure something out where I can make secure backups to some remote server. I guess there is no real perfect solution, but TrueCrypt looks good. I ran across this one talking about some deeper security constraints with this that I think offers a nice insight. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/truecrypts_den...

[flooha]

No, you're not alone. I keep all my docs under version control and it has saved me more than once.

[ErrantX]

One interesting feature Google code has implemented is placing notes about the code in the web view of the repository.

I'd love to see this feature reach other SCM providersm, it's something i would use a lot.

[blasdel]

I strongly disagree. It should be immediately after you write your first block of code :)

I have a hangup about every atomic commit needing to be a functioning version of the software. Following this logic, an initial commit that is just notes is not viable. Even if it's just some function/class prototypes that only 'raise NotImplementedError', the first commit has to do something you can execute.

I've noticed a trend of boilerplate projects on GitHub for people to use as a foundational branch, and I think that's terrific.

[mbrubeck]

Yup.

    $ mkdir newproject
    $ cd newproject
    $ git init
    Initialized empty Git repository in /home/mbrubeck/newproject/.git/

[blasdel]

But you're not actually using version control (and newproject isn't a valid git repository) until you make a commit.

While that's a bit of git wonkery, it exposes an underlying truth about VC in general: You need to have something to commit to be using it. Whether you init the repository before or after the first file hits the disk is irrelevant.