This post at port 25 (thanks  for the heads up James) talks about how Microsoft are considering moving collaborative software development forward, something which as a developer I appreciate. Unfortunately their first point (Part 1) based on some internal Microsoft coder watching was ‘Code itself was a poor conductor’ or ‘Bad currency’ for transmission of design knowledge. This immediately stood out as suspicious to me, so much weight in the OpenSource development communities is rested on using and referring to ‘The Code’. This would suggests that many OpenSource communities are misplaceing their communication reliance on Code Sharing as a primary mechanism for knowledge exchange. The reality also seems to work against this internal Microsoft research, as OpenSource seems to thrive on this ingrained approach.

Thus I think what we might be seeing here is a difference in cultures, Microsoft favouring abstraction and visualisatiuon of the code Vs OS communties promoting the design/documentation is in the code. I also think the languages and tools have a major effect, for example Ruby on Rails (ROR) is a veritable ‘superconductor’ compared to the IDE assisted languages Like C# and Java with their complex libraries and syntax. here’s a couple of simple ruby examples :

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_one :author
end

class Author < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :post
end

One really doesn’t need to add any more documentation than that, no need for a UML diagram. This also helps with the other critical requirement of nowadays development - agility. To be agile one ‘codes’ rather than ‘procrastinates’ via abstract UML diagrams, that way you actually get to a more suitable, tested solution interactively and rapidly.

The article also goes on to criticize mailing list as another poor collaborative choice for information sharing on projects, I agree on some of this, but tools like GMail improve mail list experience significantly. Also Most larger projects employ Wikis, Blogs and RSS feeds to help augment such communication in addition to the mailing list. It is also important to note that many of OS community tools are chosen for low barrier, allowing maximum participation, unlike what may be hinted to in the article for our futures.

What do you think? Am I being old fashioned ?

I am trying to cover several of my bases with this post, so I hope it makes sense. As you are probably aware we have been toying with and analysing Amazon web services (AWS). We are doing so for a number of reasons including building for what we consider to be a future platform. In the short term we have been looking at migrating existing web applications hosted in traditional environments (co-hosting etc..) towards the virtual servers/services provided by AWS.

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Doc says it all so simply

"The because effect is a kind of jujitsu. While other people look to make money with something, you're finding ways of making money because of something."

But it doesn't quite fit into a tweet..

Well it's been one heck of a busy week again, more on that later. On Wednesday I ended up at Jame's favorite watering hole (Bedales) for yet another meeting of minds. I don't know why it is but every time I meet up with James and the crew stuff just seems to happen.

James has gone well beyond his operator status and is now looking to apply that great network thinking in other pastures (in addition to his existing networks). It doesn't take a genius to work out what will happen next with green/ecological conversations with James at the helm. Just mix a born communicator with rising tide subject - and boom the Tsunami starts.

So right now I am in the latter stages of events kicked of from the meeting, and James is hitting Techmeme with his twitter currency post, along with a mug shot of me next to the story!

I now have a blogging deficit, my code is behind schedule, a project I am working on slipped a week already, add to this tens of new leads/channels and networks to follow up on and I'm already feeling that holiday weekend in front of me slipping away...

More coming soon, very soon