WANdisco’s July Roundup

As an active member of the ASF and Apache Subversion communities, this month we were excited to announce that our sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation will continue for a second year in a row. As an ASF sponsor WANdisco joins companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, HP and IBM.

The ASF Sponsorship Program is the official avenue for substantial, non-directed monetary contributions to the ASF, and funds raised through this program help the Foundation maintain leadership in the developer and open source communities.

Not content with continuing and upgrading our sponsorship, we increased the number of full-time Subversion committers by hiring two of the most experienced Subversion engineers in Branko Čibej and Stefan Fuhrmann. Branko Čibej joined the Subversion project in May 2000 and has been an active member of the community since then. He will take up the role of Director of Subversion at WANdisco.

“Apache Subversion is entering an interesting phase in its development,” said Branko. “The changes in the latest release have laid the groundwork for a slew of important new features, and I’m grateful to WANdisco for giving me the opportunity to work full-time on the project as their Director of Subversion.”

Also joining WANdisco as a full-time Subversion developer is Stefan Fuhrmann. Stefan has been involved in the Apache Subversion project since 2010, and has worked on the TortoiseSVN project since 2003.

We also saw two IBM veterans – Paul Hewitt and Scott Rudenstein –join WANdisco’s sales management team. Paul Hewitt brings more than 25 years of software industry experience to his new position as WANdisco’s Sales Director for EMEA. Paul spent 10 of those 25 years at IBM Telelogic where he rose from the rank of Principal Account Manager to become UK Managing Director and Senior Vice President for Western Europe. After assuming this leadership position, Paul was able to grow Telelogic’s revenue by more than 50%.

Meanwhile, Scott Rudenstein brings over 20 years of industry experience to his new position as Director of Technical Sales and Services at WANdisco. Scott spent over 5 years as a Senior Sales Engineer in the IBM Rational Software Group specialising in software development tools. Scott was a member of the Rational Software team that was acquired by IBM for $2.1bn in February 2003. Scott has also held various Sales Director positions at US-based software companies such as Quest Software and Surgient.

We’d like to take this opportunity to welcome all our new starters to WANdisco! Want to join them? There’s still plenty of job opportunities at our Careers page.

This month, we set out to investigate which Apache Subversion client is most popular, with a poll that asked what clients – if any – the SVN community are using. The results are in and, according to respondents, there’s a clear winner in this popularity contest as over 60% of respondents said they were using TortoiseSVN.

TortoiseSVN is a free Windows client for Subversion – if you want to find out more about what TortoiseSVN has to offer, why not take a look at our ‘Top Ten Reasons To Try TortoiseSVN’ blog post? If you want to find out what all the fuss is about for yourself, we also have a handy starter guide: ‘How to Install TortoiseSVN and Make Your First Repository Change.’

After the success of 2011’s conference, Subversion Live is back for 2012! Subversion Live 2012 will take place in San Francisco (October 10th & 11th) Greenwich, Connecticut (October 16th & 17th) and London (October 23rd & 24th) and for a limited period registrants can get a 25% discount with our Early Bird offer.

This series of two-day conferences will feature a unique mix of expert-led best practices workshops, live Subversion demos and invaluable networking opportunities with experienced peers. Attendees will also have the opportunity to meet core Subversion committers, including Greg Stein, Stefan Fuhrmann, Julian Foad and Philip Martin.

Registration is now open – and don’t forget to enter the ‘earlybird’ code to claim your 25% discount.

After more training, but can’t wait until Subversion Live 2012? After getting plenty of requests from the community for more webinars on branching and merging, not only have we added another free training webinar on branching and merging but we’ve created some handy Subversion refcards.

‘Introduction to Merging in Apache Subversion’ starts with the basic question of ‘what is merging,’ before showing you how to perform the different types of merges, including reverse merges, and finally sharing some best practices to help you avoid merge hell, while ‘Introduction to Branching in Apache Subversion’ covers the essential know-how you need to get started with branching. This refcard covers: