Quotes of the week

Also, anytime you are creating a new commit with the same changes as another commit, you are destroying `git blame`'s ability to tell you who to flog publicly. And as we all know, public floggings are the lifeblood of software development teams.

Many of the economic arguments in favor of releasing code as open source, and dedicating a significant fraction of an engineer's time to serve as a OSS project maintainer or kernel subsystem maintainer, are ones that make much more sense at a very large company like Google or IBM. That's not because startups are evil, or deficient in any way; just the economic realities that at a successful startup, everything has to be subordinated to the central goal of proving that they have a sustainable, scalable business model and that they have a good product/market fit. Everything else, and that includes participating in an open source community, is very likely a distraction from that central goal.

The results over the last year have been really amazing. Between the two of us Andrew [Bartlett] and I have pushed over 2500 patches to the Samba master repository over a year of pair programming, which is more than twice what we managed in the previous year. I find it really interesting that despite only one of us typing at a time, we get much more done with pair programming than when we work separately. The results are even more notable when you take into account that in the last year Andrew has been rebuilding his house and looking after a new baby!

I think the reason it works so well is that it tends to minimise procrastination. When I code alone and I'm stuck on a bit of code, I often find myself drifting off to read slashdot or muck about with some new application that I've found. That happens a lot less when someone else is watching over your shoulder on VNC. We discuss how we're going to solve the problem and then we solve it, without the hours of procrastination in between.