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Funnily enough, I've been toying with the idea of building a new service, something like a weird fusion of Github and Reddit, for exactly this use-case. It fee

by s_kilk 11y ago

Funnily enough, I've been toying with the idea of building a new service, something like a weird fusion of Github and Reddit, for exactly this use-case. It feels like there should be a good solution for dev-team (or even OSS community) discussion baked into the project hosting solution. The only thing holding me back is that it looks like a huge undertaking.

mbrock 11y ago
Yay for weird fusions. The internet is just a big collaboration machine and existing tools are calcified clichés. When me and my brother worked on a project, we set up our browser home pages to show a CGI gadget that grepped (well, ag'd) the source code, and commit log, for @-mentions and XXX comments. This way we could talk asynchronously inside the coding process, e.g. // @dbrock do you know a better way to do this? That was ridiculously simple to build but very effective. So I'm a fan of this linking between code and communication, and encourage you to keep experimenting!
- s_kilk 11y ago
  Thanks! I'm envisioning a github/gitlab alike source hosting service, but with the UI and UX tuned towards enabling discussion and collaboration. Sort of trying to get to Github's original motto of "Social Coding". Put more emphasis on the social and human aspect than on tweaking the product for enterprise sales. The basic idea would be to have a reddit-style threaded discussion available from any point in the repository: the repo itself, a commit, a branch, a tag, and to have easy hyper-linking between those objects. Good search would help too. Will keep experimenting.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Random crazy idea that might be useless or contraproductive: have users install a small daemon that notifies the server about their workspace changes in between commits, so you can see what people are working on live. In a team setting such as where I work, it's somewhat arbitrary that I only learn about work once it's committed and pushed. It would be interesting to see in real time what people are messing around with. But I also like the idea of asynchronicity, and taking inspiration from open source collaboration into the business world, rather than the other way around... By the way, it seems to me that the basic functionality of GitHub and GitLab is quite simple, and the kind of thing you could make an MVP of in a weekend or two, if you carefully avoid complications and keep it ruthlessly simple...
    - sytse 11y ago
      To see what people are doing we frequently use WIP merge requests http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/wip_merge_requests.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/wip_merge_requests.html but this still requires you to push.
  - sytse 11y ago
    I think we already have discussions on commits in GitLab. We used to have discussions on repo's (the wall) but this wasn't used much. I agree with the hyperlinking, if I mention an issue in the chat the issue should get a backlink to the chat archive.
sitkack 11y ago
What is wrong with just creating a subreddit for a repo?

by s_kilk 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago

Yay for weird fusions. The internet is just a big collaboration machine and existing tools are calcified clichés. When me and my brother worked on a project, we set up our browser home pages to show a CGI gadget that grepped (well, ag'd) the source code, and commit log, for @-mentions and XXX comments. This way we could talk asynchronously inside the coding process, e.g. // @dbrock do you know a better way to do this? That was ridiculously simple to build but very effective. So I'm a fan of this linking between code and communication, and encourage you to keep experimenting!

s_kilk 11y ago
Thanks! I'm envisioning a github/gitlab alike source hosting service, but with the UI and UX tuned towards enabling discussion and collaboration. Sort of trying to get to Github's original motto of "Social Coding". Put more emphasis on the social and human aspect than on tweaking the product for enterprise sales. The basic idea would be to have a reddit-style threaded discussion available from any point in the repository: the repo itself, a commit, a branch, a tag, and to have easy hyper-linking between those objects. Good search would help too. Will keep experimenting.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Random crazy idea that might be useless or contraproductive: have users install a small daemon that notifies the server about their workspace changes in between commits, so you can see what people are working on live. In a team setting such as where I work, it's somewhat arbitrary that I only learn about work once it's committed and pushed. It would be interesting to see in real time what people are messing around with. But I also like the idea of asynchronicity, and taking inspiration from open source collaboration into the business world, rather than the other way around... By the way, it seems to me that the basic functionality of GitHub and GitLab is quite simple, and the kind of thing you could make an MVP of in a weekend or two, if you carefully avoid complications and keep it ruthlessly simple...
  - sytse 11y ago
    To see what people are doing we frequently use WIP merge requests http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/wip_merge_requests.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/wip_merge_requests.html but this still requires you to push.
- sytse 11y ago
  I think we already have discussions on commits in GitLab. We used to have discussions on repo's (the wall) but this wasn't used much. I agree with the hyperlinking, if I mention an issue in the chat the issue should get a backlink to the chat archive.

sitkack 11y ago

What is wrong with just creating a subreddit for a repo?