Alex Miller's technical blog
I don’t use Twitter or even know anyone who does, but it occurred to me today that in a distributed development team, getting a Twitter automatically on a source commit would be a good way to distribute knowledge of what others are doing. Just an idea. Or maybe this is too useful for Twitter. :)
I also noticed that someone just released an open source Java API for Twitter.
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Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for Revelytix on semantic web products.
In the past I worked for Terracotta, BEA Systems, and MetaMatrix. My main language for the last decade has been Java, although I’m interested in many different languages. I am the founder of the Lambda Lounge user group and the Strange Loop developer conference.
Catch me on Twitter as @puredanger.
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There are any number of tools which will send a mail, IM, or post RSS feed on commit (or build). They are indeed quite handy for dev teams, distributed or not. What would the advantage of twitter be for this role?
Yeah, I’m familiar with (and use) such tools. My thinking was really triggered by reading an article in the latest Wired magazine on Twitter (sorry for no link – it doesn’t seem to be online yet) about how Twitter lets you create sort of an extended sense for what your social network is doing. And then that intersected with a thought that what you need to know in a distributed development environment is what other people are working on.
For me, I like using feeds for this right now. But if I used Twitter, it seemed like that might be even better. Basically you have people typing in comments to their commit sets about what they’ve been doing already – why not spread that around automatically?
The development team that I am part of runs a small private IRC server. We use rbot and some subversion hooks to announce to the channel when a commit is made. We also have some custom IRC scripts that turns this output into links that go right to tickets and changesets on our Trac. Very handy.