I use it as a reminder of what I did over the last year for performance reviews. I use a date range on the 'svn log' command to see all of my commit messages an

I use it as a reminder of what I did over the last year for performance reviews. I use a date range on the 'svn log' command to see all of my commit messages and which files I changed. I frequently find smaller things I did that I forgot about and which may have had an outsized impact on our work as a team. I can find refactorings pretty easily with it, too. I've also used it to do some deep archeology. I had a piece of code I inherited that was always problematic. Eventually, I went through its history to figure out what it was originally intended to do and why it changed over the years. This was invaluable for finally figuring out how to fix the damn thing once and for all.