There has been some talk around using physical, colored, lamps to notify build results (pragmatic automation, Carlos Sanchez, Richard Durnall, Alberto Savoia).

The idea comes from Lean Manufacturing principles developed by Toyota applied to software development. An “andon” paper lamp was a way to let other workers know there was a problem on the assembly line. The idea for builds is that while a build is running, an amber light flashes, letting other developers know not to run a build, a green light signifies the last build was completed successfully, and a red light means the build is broken and needs to be fixed.

While I’m sure it is an entertaining exercise to set this up, some simple software automation could achieve the same results, and it has obvious faults, like what if I am working from home?

Email is the de facto standard for build notification. There is a hardcoded mailing list somewhere and you get the email, even if you don’t want it, and you have to go and check your mail to receive it.

Twitter, on the other hand, puts the user in control of the notifications in true Web 2.0 fashion. Tweets are also ideal for receiving notifications via cell phone, where email is generally not. Consider the following cases:

• I can follow the build when I want, and unfollow when I want. No going to an admin to remove me from the list.
• I can turn on device updates so I get an SMS message about the result (maybe an important release is coming up), or I can turn off device updates, say, when I’m on vacation.
• I can retweet (forward) the build notification.
• You can put links in the message. Meister uploads all build logs in HTML format to a web server and we would include the link to that.

About a year ago, I used Meister with a post-build activity to Tweet the build result after a build. The activity was a simple Perl script using Net::Twitter. Let’s just say this experiment sort of fell on deaf ears.

Now I’m ready to roll with this again and you can follow my progress. I had created a Twitter account, @builds, for this purpose. In a day or two, you’ll see some tweets from that guy from one of my builds.

I’m interested in what other people have to say. Meister already uses Eclipse RCP as it’s front end, but most other build tools are still command-line and in the 1970’s. Let’s bring build management tools into the 21st century with Web 2.0 features.

With the Web 2.0 evolution, information flow between people has changed from a ‘push’ paradigm (I send you an email) to a pull paradigm (I follow you on Twitter). How could this possibly relate to code management such as branching, merging and history? Well, Git’s distributed repository model and how one obtains code updates from “friend” repositories is similar to Twitter and how you obtain status updates on the people you choose to follow. Instead of communicating micro-blog entries or status updates, Git is communicating source code branch updates.

Also like how Facebook or Twitter allows you to specify a person’s name in lieu of the communication protocol identifier (email address or web page), Git uses aliases for long repository locations so you have a more direct, natural language and human feel to what you are doing: “git fetch linus” will pull changes from Linus’ repository, which you have only had to define once.

Here is a scenario where Steve and I are working on a part of the Linux file system to provide information useful for build management and dependency tracking, which Meister and other tools can take advantage of. Steve started by cloning the master Linux repository and started working away making changes. Steve asked me to work on another part of this project, so I cloned his repository, allowing me to pick up all his changes. I am now automatically following (Git calls it remote-tracking) Steve’s “master” branch of his repository since I started my repository by cloning his. The “master” branch is a.k.a. the “trunk” code stream. I can pick up his updates periodically with:

$ git pull

Now, I may also want to get updates directly from the master Linux repository, but it has a complicated URL that I won’t remember and only want to look up once. So, as a one-time command I do:

$ git remote add linux-nfs git://linux-nfs.org/pub/nfs-2.6.git


Forever after:

$ git fetch linux-nfs
* refs/remotes/linux-nfs/master: storing branch 'master' ...
commit: bf81b46


The “fetch” command doesn’t put the master Linux changes directly into my workspace, but off to the side for me to examine first (very nice). If I want, I can accept the changes into my local work tree. To tell me which repositories I am following (which friends), I do:

$ git branch –r
linux-nfs/master
steve/master
origin/master


“origin/master” is my own trunk. I could also get the full repository information associated with the short names, but as long as it works, I don’t want to know what it is. For me, this type of friendly and fluid interaction with repositories is one of the major advantages over CVS and Subversion.

I’ve been using and experimenting with Facebook, LinkedIn, All About Wine, Ancestry.com and Plaxo online social networking. I am confident I will be a user of online social networks as long as I can type, and hopefully longer. Here are the things I like best about using them:

Enables Greater Social Interaction

This is especially true with people that you would not socialize with frequently such as people you don’t see in the office every day. My social interaction with these people went from ‘never’ to ’sometimes’. This includes those of my friends and relatives who are a great physical distance away. As people move, my laptops explode, and email clients change, I lose track of people’s email addresses, so I miss out on sending a holiday greeting or the latest round of baby pictures.

Between Facebook and LinkedIn, I pretty much have all of my high school and college friends somewhere and that can be beneficial professionally as well as socially.

Saves Time

Some of my friends say that Facebook uses up too much of their time, but I find that Facebook in particular saves me a lot of time. I can click on anyone’s face in the Entourage application and send them a quick note. Or, I can take advantage of Facebook’s slick auto-complete where I only need to type one or two characters to uniquely identify someone. Time savings would be #1 on my list if it were not for the fact that this greater facilitation leads me to slightly more interaction. I do not consider the greater interaction to be a distraction, but it in fact slightly improves my overall quality of life.

LinkedIn also saves me time professionally. Forwarding someone’s LinkedIn profile is much faster than attaching a resume document and writing an introductory email.

Facilitates Special Interests

Facebook also helps me share my interest in less popular topics with like-minded enthusiasts. I can easily send soccer highlight videos or punk rock news to those few friends of mine who are interested. While I could create an email list to do the same, Facebook makes it far simpler and much faster to manage these types of lists. Or, I can post something, and those who spot the post on their mini-feed and are interested can click on it to learn more.

I suppose baby pictures fall into this category. Facebook in particular has awesome picture sharing functionality. The ability to ‘tag’ people in photos and have Facebook collect them is priceless. For example, I get can all the pictures taken by many different people where I am tagged and Facebook will collect them for me into a single slide show.