I just joined a new team (very small: four developers in total, with two of those leaving soon). The two original developers set up the git repo on a folder in a Windows network share.

Am I taking crazy pills, or is that a bad idea? Our organization does have github/gitlab/bitbucket available, so is there any good reason not to use those hosted solutions?

  • Do you mean a bare repo you use as a remote and push/pull from or using the workdir straight from the share. The first would be strange, but kinda usable (don’t do this though), the latter is oh my god, get an other job category.

    • Working from the network share - I’ve worked on a project like this before, it was awful for developer experience. It took seconds to run a git status, it was so slow. Occasionally git would lock itself out of being able to update files, since the network read/write times were so slow. Large merges were impossible.

      The reason it was set up like this was that the CEO had the network share we were working off of set up to serve to a subdomain (so like, Bob’s work would be at bob.example.com), and it would update live as most hot-reloads will do. He wanted to be able to spy on developers and see what they were doing at any given time.

      I have a lot of programming horror stories from that job. The title of this thread brought up a lot of repressed memories.