Developer collaboration III
06/17/2008
By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering

Check out this post Ben Collins-Sussman posted to his blog on Thursday. Ben's one of the primary authors of Subversion -- the repository we use for all our projects around Jaduka and NetworkIP -- and has been at Google for some time now as a lead engineer.

Ben's post addresses what he identifies as "programmer insecurity" -- why do we as developers always wanna hold off on releasing our own code until we've reached some future state of perfection ... and then why do we wanna cover our tracks when we're done? -- as an entry point to talk about why programmers work the way we do. And also how the tools that we chose to work with can help us hide or share our results.

It's a point well taken: there's no question that "commit early, commit often" helps foster a solid team understanding of what the key subsystems in the codebase are actually *doing*. And this seems to be just as much the case with projects internal to our own teams here as it is with open source initiatives.

I've blogged elsewhere about the value of different tools -- like UNIX screen and conference bridges -- for developer collaboration. Ben's post makes the additional point that, above and beyond our favorite collaborative tools, we have to work to ensure a collaborative workflow on our teams.

Well worth checking out.