Comments on: Freewheeling about excavating information and stuff like that

By: Code_swarm and community

Code_swarm and community — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:38:44 +0000

[...] wrote recently about a conversation with Jerm about commit logs, opensource and hiring; Ted chipped in to the [...]

By: david cushman

david cushman — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:33:24 +0000

Great to meet you too JP. Our chat inspired one of the 2009 predictions I’ve thrown into the mix today. I’m sure you’ll be inspiring much more over the coming years.

By: Karra

Karra — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:49:13 +0000

Jeremy: The point for me is how the wealth of information about an open source developer contrasts with the past

Absolutely. I agree.

By: Jeremy Ruston

Jeremy Ruston — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:58:35 +0000

Karra – Commit logs are just a part of the residue that an open source developer leaves behind them, and they need care and plenty of context if they are to be useful in making a judgement about the quality of someone’s work. The point for me is how the wealth of information about an open source developer contrasts with the past, where one might have had to make hiring decisions about someone on the basis of what they said in interview, and the reputation of their previous employer.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:37:14 +0000

I’ll stop writing “oops. silly me” into my commit comment from this point on.

By: Karra

Karra — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:04:00 +0000

record it in logs that everyone can see. Make sure that the logs are available in perpetuity. After all, how else will people find out how good you are?

I am not sure why you pick out commit logs for special mention. Perhaps you are selecting for a specific trait when you talk about figuring out how good a person is by looking at the logs. Encouraging developers to acquire a good taste for commit logs is no different from encouraging a good commenting style, or even coding style, and a programmer’s worth is a function of how well she does all of those things (… and more)

Commit logs are not a way to show off how good you are. Sharing the right quantity and quality of information in the commit log increases productivity of the team – the motives behind revealing more information on social sites, on the other hand, are quite removed from that, I suspect.

To be able to truly judge the quality of a log one should be familiar with the code base (but not necessarily the commit in question, as pointed out), in which case you have much more to go by – the difficulty of the bug that was fixed, the elegance of the code fix, the style and quality of the comments – all of which are also recorded for posterity in the commits along with the logs. If you are unfamiliar with the code, you will tend to have bias for verbose logs, which will skew your analysis anyways.

Perhaps I am reading too much into your two sentence observation of the issue, but I would be delighted to hear Jeremy’s views as well as why you found them interesting.

On the issue of reference from trusted sources – LinkedIn, I think, presents a very interesting case. While I am yet to see (and I do not expect to see one, to be honest) a poor recommendation on someone’s page, I feel it would be extremely unlikely that a person would put substantially false claims on his public page – even without any explicit recommendations. A candidate is far more likely to distort facts in a resume submitted in private, rather than out in the open on a system like LinkedIn. I call this the Implicit Recommendation of the Cloud (IRoC).

By: James Strachan

James Strachan — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:07:35 +0000

Speaking of using svn commit logs to see what folks do in OSS – have you seen Ohloh.net? Its kinda great and kinda scary at the same time :)

e.g. here’s some of what I’ve been up to over the years…

https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/jstrachan?ref=Detailed

Its a pretty good service – lets you see who’s contributed to what and so forth. It doesn’t handle CVS/svn migration or svn relocation so often cuts off years of OSS contributions – but its about the best I’ve seen so far.

I guess we could do with some aggregation of all this with JIRA / forum / mailing list & wiki activity maybe – as there’s more to OSS than just svn commits

By: James

James — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:43:45 +0000

One hurdle to overcome is the understanding and maturity of those reading the twitter/facebook etc.
I think for people to be able to share that level of information and link it to their work persona will require an understanding that not everything will be positive, that references to failure are not a bad thing and that it is acceptable to express negative emotions, albeit in a positive way.

These are the things I see the Osmosoft guys, and others, doing and it is wonderful to see leaders like Jeremy and you encouraging this.

When I think of my own industry (Management consulting) I can see we have a long way to go to get to the stage where this is possible.

By: John Roberts

John Roberts — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:18:55 +0000

Have you read David Brin’s The Transparent Society? In the same vein, though more about how many eyes will lessen the negative effects of government surveillance. If everyone has a camera, many eyes go to work.

The recent NY city policeman incident shows the tip of the iceberg:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10125084-93.html