In my last job I worked with a team of about 50 other developers all working on the same project. A senior developer had set up a source control system that allowed us all to play together without overwriting each other's code.

When I moved to my current, much smaller team there was no source control system. We didn't seem to need it, except the few small times a month when we did. None of these moments seemed big enough to warrant setting up a proper source control system. However, when you add them all up, we could have saved ourselves a lot of heart ache.

I decided I wanted to fix this, but didn't really know where to start. I found Eric Sink's series of articles on how to do source control incredibly helpful. They helped me understand the basics so I could choose a suitable system and be able to install and use it.

I now have a working Subversion Source Control Server and I'm using Tortoise as my Source Control Client. The nice thing about Tortoise is that it integrates really nicely into Windows Explorer.

I'm evaluating it at home before I try and set it up at work. I've only been using it for an evening and I've already found it useful. Soon, just like my mobile phone, I don't think I'll be able to remember how I coped without it.