The Perforce conference was entertaining and educational. San Francisco is a hole, but we were pretty much in the hotel all the time, except for a party/“dinner” and a walk down the street to the training facility for those of us who took classes as well.

When I first mentioned the conference, David commented about how one of his clients who tested it had serious performance issues and felt it “really, really disliked binaries being checked in”. This would come as news to the many companies who talked about checking in all their build artifacts, and to the large game companies who check in hundreds of gigabytes of digital assets for all their projects. (or even the last three companies I’ve worked at…) Git and Mercurial have problems with large files and big repositories, but Perforce? Nah.

(not that there aren’t companies who’ll sell you solutions to speed up Perforce, but that means things like “massive parallel checkouts in seconds” and “scaling to petabyte repos”)

My only complaint about the show was the limited amount of vendor swag. They tied everything into a “social” app where you checked in by scanning QR codes and built up points by posting chatty little updates. This was of course gamed to the point that the only actual prize, an Oculus Rift, was won by the person who relentlessly spammed the app with “social” updates. Most of us were there to actually pay attention to presentations and corner the development team, so it wasn’t much of a contest. I figure I’ll have our new sales rep scrounge up some of the leftover swag when she comes out to meet the team.

For me personally, I brought home a lot of good information about how to improve our current server and integrate our wanna-git devs. Their current interim gitlab-to-p4d shim is working for a lot of people, but I have to workaround some issues to use it in our environment (being a little too git-like, it bypasses some of the security features in Perforce, which I can’t allow).

9/10: would kill bad robots again.