

FriendFeed Changelog: see what code we are writing - paul
http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/02/friendfeed-changelog-see-what-code-we.html

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paul
Here's the actual changelog, btw: <http://changelog.friendfeed.com/>

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joshwa
I've considered doing this for a while, too. I went to far as to make a post-
commit hook script for subversion to post to twitter, but it was friends-only
so only my collaborator and I could see it.

Even better would be to post the diffs :-P

Would people be interested in seeing the svn changelog on my current project?

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nickb
Very cool!

PS: paul, what do you guys use on the backend? I see you guys use nginx (great
choice). What else?

~~~
paul
Python, mostly. There's a little bit of c++ to make some things fast, but
we're trying to minimize that.

~~~
rsa
Paul, Do you guys use any web framework for python ?

~~~
paul
It's custom, but apparently similar to a few of the popular ones.

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pchristensen
"Paul recently suggested that we could save ourselves a lot of time writing
blog posts if we just sent out our changelists from Mercurial"

Wow. I mean, wow!! This is a great way to get technical people invested in the
development of your app!

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joshwa
choice exerpts:

    
    
      changeset:   50bb94a18270
      user:        bret
      date:        2008-02-26 13:23:50
      description: Undo shitty code.
    
       ---
    
      Sat, Feb 23: Let's redo our entire UI two days before launch
    

:)

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michael_nielsen
I'd love to set an ethographer loose on this, and see what insights they have
about how programmers and programming works. Might make a nice PhD thesis for
someone :-)

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neilc
There have already been a bunch of academics studying the version control
histories of major open source projects, for example as a means to gain
insight into why open source development "works" (i.e. is able to produce very
high-quality software). One of the cool things about studying an OSS project
is that everything is public, and the vast majority of the communication
happens via an archived, digital medium: you can correlate VCS history with
mailing list activity with bug tracker activity with website traffic logs, for
example.

An example paper related to this idea is
[http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhanivonhippelusersupport...](http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhanivonhippelusersupport.pdf)
("How Open Source Software Works: "Free" User-to-User Assistance", studying
Apache)

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staunch
When I think about doing this myself I immediately start coming up with flimsy
excuses for why I can't. I believe a lot of doing a startup well is daring to
put yourself out there to be judged. This is right in line with that idea (to
an extreme). Brave and commendable.

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henning
damn, that's a lot of commits. I only usually make 3-5 a day, but then again I
only work on my work stuff 8 hours a day, too.

~~~
mrtron
I find it depends on the type of work I am doing.

Creating a new module - a daily commit. Bug fixing - a zillion commits. GUI
work - a zillion commits.

Since it was right before prelaunch, and presumably a lot of GUI/bug fixes,
seems right.

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eusman
modern cold war

