Waldo Codes

This took place back in the days before Git became the standard for source control. Back then people used zip files saved into folders on the desktop. The wiser folks used centralized source control. The wild and crazy used some new thing called Git.

At work I had was tasked with setting up our source control. I went online and searched till I found a online provider offering SVN hosting. And that was the end of it. Years worth of work went into our cloud hosted SVN repos.

One morning I walked into work got my coffee sat down to pull the latest code from our SVN repository. My request returned with an error. At work the internet was coming over a 1mb line so it could be a little iffy. I tried again. Another error. Going down the rabbit hole I ended up going to the our SVN providers website.

I don't remember the exact wording but the message on the website read something like this...

“We are sorry to inform you that 'Acme SVN Hosting' is no longer in business. Our Amazon server was hacked because we used a weak password. The hacker demanded a ransom. We chose to not pay so we are out of business effective today. Sorry about your code, we hope you have a local copy”

Pretty basic mistake weak password. A tragic tale. They were out of business and we were no longer customers. Thankfully, we did have recent local copies and were able to piece things back together.

The easiest thing would have been to find another SVN provider and to continue using SVN. Instead I decided it would be a good time to switch source control. We moved over to TFS on Azure. Needless to say many pains were ahead of us. Looking back it is sad because Git was very mature by this time. This story makes the case for distributed source control. Why

Happy Coding!