Wed, Nov 02, 2005
The Thrill of Pair Programming
#
I have a lot of different passions, which is lucky in a lot of ways,
and unlucky in others. It's lucky because it makes life incredibly
fun. It's unlucky, because life is finite, and I don't have time to
delve as deeply into things as I would like. It's why I knew I would
never become a professional programmer. (JZB)
This past year, I spent most of my time doing field work and thinking
about social processes. When I switched into technical mode, it was
as an architect or a pundit, not as a programmer. And that's the way
it should be. It's the right mode for me professionally and
personally. Besides, the less time in front of a computer, the
better. (JZC)
However, that's changed these past few months, as I've had to wear my
coding hat for a variety of reasons. And I have to admit, it still
gets me going. My skills have degraded a lot over the years, more
from disuse than age, but I can still get it done. It makes me feel
like one of those clean-cut, Midwestern types who comes home from his
nine-to-five job, then plays poker all night at some seedy underground
club. It's liberating. (JZD)
In particular, I had fun PairProgramming with PeterKaminski
a few weeks
ago and with BrianIngerson
last night.
Both of those efforts were toy one-offs, but they were great fun
nevertheless, and it got me thinking. Coding with others, and pairing
in particular, is one of the most intense, enjoyable collaborative
experiences one can have. Read EvanHenshawPlath's account of his
recent RubyOnRails sprint with BlaineCook and KellanElliottMcCrea, and you'll see what I
mean. It's the sort of thing I never get to do anymore. (JZE)
I know a lot of great coders, and I love talking shop. And, I still
want to spend as little time as possible in front of a computer. But,
I'm going to make a concerted effort to pair with folks at least once
every few months. If you're in the BayArea and are in the mood to
code up something that is small, cool, and will improve collaboration
some way, somehow, let me know. (JZF)
/tech/programming |
Posted at 5:21pm
Purple Numbers and WIKIWYG
#
For a while, it was looking like I was going to
break another personal
blogging record last month, then things got so busy I had zero time
to blog whatsoever. That means I'm in catch up mode again, so as
usual, I'll post in reverse chronological order (which in the
blogosphere is really reverse reverse chronological order). (JYN)
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at SocialText, where they were having
an all-hands meeting. They graciously invited me to participate in
the OpenSpace segment of their gathering, which meant quality time
with ChrisDent and a rare opportunity to evangelize the ChurchOfPurple
together. Of course, Chris has been spreading the Purple religion at
SocialText for a while now, so it wasn't as much about evangelism as
it was about next steps. (JYO)
As I've
mentioned many times before, browser-based WYSIWYG editors are an
exciting development because they allow us to make PurpleNumbers
transparent in the authoring process. Right now, when you edit a
PurpleWiki page, you see the node ID tags (e.g. {nid 123}).
This is impossible to get around with the default browser text-editing
widget. However, with a WYSIWYG editor, you can hide the
PurpleNumbers while still maintaining their associations with a node
behind the scenes. (JYP)
That's the theory, anyway. In particular, I've been excited about
WIKIWYG ever since RossMayfield
showed
me an early prototype last August. I had a personal bias, since
ChrisDent and MattLiggett helped write it, as did CaseyWest and the
inimitable BrianIngerson, whom I finally met last weekend at TagCamp. (JYQ)
Yesterday afternoon, we discussed PurpleNumbers and WIKIWYG, and it
was good. Then in the evening, Ingy and I spent a few hours trying to
get WIKIWYG integrated into PurpleWiki. (JYR)
We didn't quite make it. Our biggest roadblock was a bug we
discovered in Mozilla's design mode that we can't do much about. (My
days of statically typed languages are well behind me.) But, we got
something somewhat working, and I learned a heckuvalot. You can play
with our semi-working demo. (JYS)
WIKIWYG seems well-architected and is easy to customize. For folks
with relatively standard Wiki editing requirements, I highly encourage
you to play with it. PurpleWiki has some special formatting funkiness
(mainly due to the PurpleNumbers), but we were able to get around this
fairly easily. (This was also true thanks to PurpleWiki's model of
parsing to an intermediate data structure, then using view drivers to
serialize. I wish more Wiki engines did this. I know MagnusManske is
thinking about doing this for MediaWiki, and I think JanneJalkanen is
already doing it with JSPWiki.) (JYT)
The Mozilla bug annoyed me, because it's a show-stopper in some ways,
and there's not much I can do about it. I didn't realize it, but all
of the JavaScript WYSIWYG widgets actually switch to the browser's
"design mode" in order to handle WYSIWYG editing. As with many HTML
editors, design mode does not handle structure cleanly, and you end up
getting weird artifacts such as spurious break tags. Our problem was
that we serialize node ID information as id attributes in the
HTML tags. However, FireFox does not maintain those attributes
correctly when you move content around. (JYU)
I'll report the bug (if folks have suggestions as to the best way to
bring this to the right people's attention, let me know), but it also
puts the kibosh on my hopes for WIKIWYG and PurpleNumbers. Even if
the bug is fixed in the next version of FireFox, we're still prey to
all the folks using older versions as well as InternetExplorer or
Safari, which have their own problems with design mode. (JYV)
Chris and I discussed one workaround that I'm still pondering: render
the PurpleNumber and have users be responsible for maintaining the
association with the nodes. That's the status quo, except users are
doing it in WikiText rather than in WYSIWYG. Doing it in WYSIWYG
certainly lowers the bar, and it's probably the next best thing for us
to do. (JYW)
/tech/purple |
Posted at 4:23pm
