At the time I was working on a student project and all I needed was some source control. A project hosting service would provide much more than that, which I didn’t take into account at all. Now when comparing similar services, issues like integrated bugtracking, the type of source control system used and availability of private repositories are much more important to me than they were in my previous review.

Here’s a list of what I want no matter what:

• Private repository (at least one).
• Support for a distributed version control system (Git or Mercurial).
• Integration with a bugtracker.

So the the following are four more project hosting services for anyone who needs an integrated solution with private source control hosting:

Bitbucket

This is my personal favorite. Lately I’ve been reading about distributed version control systems (DVCS), like Mercurial and Git, and growing fond of them. I can say that I switched to using Mercurial for all my personal projects. Bitbucket is a service that gives you unlimited private and public source repositories based on Mercurial, with an integrated bugtracker for free up to 5 users. They also have other pricing plans for larger projects, but this is the best free offer you will find on the market. I’ve been using Bitbucket for a while now and these terms are new, after today they announced they’ve been acquired by Atlassian. Definitively a good bet.

Kiln

A work of FogCreek software, which you’ve probably heard of (Joel Spolsky). Kiln is a system implemented on top of Mercurial, which adds some advanced features (not listed because they are irrelevant in the comparison). One good thing is that it integrates very nicely with FogBugz, a top-notch bugtracking tool. Please note that what I’ve used is the so-called “Student and Startup Edition”, which allows for unlimited space and number of repositories for 2 users. They provide a standalone Kiln client, but any Mercurial client should work (if you want tighter integration with your IDE for example).

Project Locker

Up to 3 projects, 500MB, 5 users – free. That’s their offering. The difference here would be that they offer Subversion and Git hosting, rather than Mercurial. If that’s the type of source control you’d rather use, maybe this is a better option for you. Github might actually be better known, but as of now they don’t offer a private repository for free, and that’s one of my primary concerns. The con I find about Project Locker is their speed and the clumsy and unfriendly web interface. They also only provide TRAC for bugtracking, and put ads on those pages when you browse, which is probably understandable, but still a downside.

Beanstalk

This is what I used before I switched to Project Locker. The two are probably comparable, Beanstalk have a free account for 3 users, 1 private repository and 100MB of space. Subversion and Git are supported, but space is definitely a limiting factor here. The web interface is wonderful compared to Project Locker, but I wouldn’t use this for anything else than a test project simply because of the 100 MB limitation. Please note that they also don’t provide integration with a bugtracking service.

I’ve been researching services similar to the ones above for more than a year or two now, and the ones I mentioned are what I consider the best at the moment. Please share your comments if you’ve used some of them and have any particular impressions or know about another one I probably haven’t heard of. Until the next edition of such a comparison, happy coding.

When you go to the Favorites tab, the current location within the CHM is selected automatically. You only need to click the Add button and it’s added to the (initially empty) list of topics. Next time you open the CHM, just go there and open the topic you last saved. Neat.

Treating all customers the same and treating every customer well is putting a bottom limit on frustration – you can’t go too bad if you do it. Treating customers differently gives you the opportunity to make your best ones love you.

In college I only studied Intro to Marketing for one semester, and it was far from my main focus. What I noticed, though, is that all textbooks and materials tell you that the customer is always right, you should always listen to the customer. Well, not always. Not if this customer makes you spend double the effort on him just to not hate you. Instead, you can devote this time to invent something for the customers that love you. As Seth Godin says, they will talk about you and bring many more after them.

Where I come from, in elementary schools they treat all students the same. They put a bottom limit on quality. They ensure that every student is educated and literate. What they don’t ensure is that schools produce geniuses and achievers. For this to happen, you need to remove the top limit, you need to give students the freedom to explore, the resources and the attention.

In my daily job I sometimes come in contact with customers who always complain about something and want a solution ASAP. They threaten to abandon your product and go to the competition. I say let them go. You have two choices to spend your time – convince them they are wrong and your product is good, or work on the product and make it awesome. You could also work on a program to provide benefits to your VIP customers (the ones who love you). This second choice would be a much better investment than the first one.

This could probably be applied everywhere people are involved – HR, education, communications. Don’t introduce bottom limits. Remove the top limits instead.

UPDATE: Here’s a very good article by Seth Godin that I think relates to this post.