Video presentation by two of the original SVN developers talking about social good-practices with programming and the way different tools affects that.
Thoughts while watching:
- “fail early, fail often” - Pretty much a theme throughout, and fair enough
- code reviews - So many big name places seem to take this dead seriously
- no code ownership - Code ownership always tends to be bad, liked the suggestions on how to lessen it though, ie
- assign bugs/features to people with a low knowledge of that area
- pair program bugs/features for that area low-knowledge/high-knowledge
- big fish, small pond - No doubt it’s true that working with more skilled people than yourself is good for you, but it can be pretty hard just to recognise what you want to learn let alone find the people/environment that supports that
- ‘bus factor’ - heh, awesome name
- git-rebase - I dunno that lots of people use this to rewrite history? I use it to avoid pointless noisy merge commits
- documenting failure - Seems pretty obvious that doing this would be helpful, but as with all documentation I have no idea how to do it in a way that would be useful
- subversion - I understand these guys fondness for svn, but it’s so far behind in so many areas, and I think github-like tools affectively alleviate their problems with distributed version control more than they acknowledged
- pair programming - I think this is the one core practice detailed by XP that’s still seriously controversial. I have no opinion :-)
People who ask tangential societal questions after a talk drive me nuts. “really in reality” points are seriously annoying as well. “buyer beware”. Piss off, buyer is beware, just assume (as the presenter does) that the audience is as capable of understanding the realities of their own situation as you are.
