Yesterday, we switched* our Subversion repository over to Mercurial and hosted it on Kiln. Check ‘er out: http://khanacademy.kilnhg.com

We switched for a number of reasons:

• DVCS is better. If you disagree, you might be on the wrong blog. Here.
• We’re a geographically separate team at the moment, and the more powerful our code review tools, the better.
• We have a number of different dev efforts going on across this geographically separate team, and each is in a different state of stability. Without easy branching and merging, we’ve been in a state of pain.

We’ve found an extremely talented high school developer in Omar Rizwan.

I could go on about improvements I know (hope) are waiting for us, but I want to stick to an honest description of the Khan Academy team’s experience, and it’s only been one day. Will let you know how it goes.

*Props to the Kiln team’s work on this part of the process . I started w/ an old machine that had neither Subversion nor Mercurial installed. Downloaded the Kiln Import Tool and ran it. It took me through installation, conversion, and upload seamlessly.