Bitbucket and Mercurial

It has been recently announced that Bitbucket will be leaving Mercurial support in 2020 [1], defaulting to Git from then on.

A lot of things come to mind when reading the announcement, mostly because Mercurial has been my first distributed revision control system or at least the first one I understood. It's fairly simple to use, concise and with a simple interface, but sadly has fallen in popularity.

Git has won in other fields where popularity is more important that correctness and simplicity. If I would go back in time and choose between Git and Mercurial, I would still choose Mercurial, it's still a great tool.


[1] https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket

Is not about the tool

Over and over I keep listening and reading in software development forums about certain types of questions:

• What is the best tool to do ?
• What is the perfect IDE for ?
• What can I use for modelling in ?

I know this because I started with those questions as well when I started a few years ago, but when dealing with different things during my short experience I have learned that the answers were never going to be enough, because the questions never were the correct ones in first place.

Let me explain that, the questions I (and some other developer folks) was asking during those initial years in my experience could be translated to other contexts in this way:

• What is the best hummer to build a chair?
• What is the best brand for office furniture?
• What pencil can I use to draw amazing designs?

If you can read them well, you can understand how lame they are. I should have focused first in the concepts that enable those tools to be useful. The tools are just the medium to build something, the major part of the problem is to identify and understand what to build first.

Of course is very useful (and mandatory) to know about the tools, but the effort should be directed to understand how thinks do and should work. That's the reason why the Business Analyst title is so hot at the moment, we as developers have sent the system's business to the background of things, that's my advice, focus on the concepts, business and things that have value, the tools will come eventually.