Monthly Archives: June 2008

Trickr, or Humanising the Developers (Part 2)

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Back for more, my wee little tin miners? As we say ’round these parts, Onwards!

But first thanks to Rafe, and Stephen for playing along.

[flickr_staff_buddy_icon name=mylesdgrant]
Myles, POWER USER!
Testing on dev is for the unconfident.

Macbook Pro, Textmate, scp, Firefox, Firebug, ack, Quicksilver, iTerm, vi, Mail.app.

[flickr_staff_buddy_icon name=norby]
Norby, Ops Succubus
Sleep! What is it with you people and sleep?

  • Y!-issue MBP (upgraded to Leopard w/ spaces)
  • Terminal, ssh, Safari, Firefox, Nagios, vi
  • tunnels >> VPN, have more than one RSA key if you work remotely :)

[flickr_staff_buddy_icon name=laloyd]
Paul L, Roaming (not Roman) Yeti
Gngghhhghghhh

MacBook Pro, JDK 1.6, IntelliJ Idea 7.03, iTerm, one reliable crazy Canadian-Russian.

[flickr_staff_buddy_icon name=schill]
Schill, Lil’ Javascript charmer
[ This space left intentionally blank ]

MBP, TextMate, A-grade (Fx/Safari/Opera) browsers, IE 6/7/8 + MS Script debugger via Parallels. GIMP for the odd image edit. Dell 24″.

Fun stuff: Beyerdynamic DT-880 headphones, iTunes + last.fm + SOMA FM for muzak. Finger rocket defense system. Grande dark roast in the AM.

[flickr_staff_buddy_icon name=sm]
Serguei, Ex-KGB Field Agent
Comments are lying, code tells the truth!

PC laptop. JDK 1.6, IntelliJ Idea 7.03, FAR manager, SecureCRT ssh client. kill, especially in its most radical form kill -9. And tail -f , I can watch logs for hours, it’s better than TV.

[flickr_staff_buddy_icon name=hitherto]
Simon, Totally bi(linguisticalated)
Um, no, that won’t work in French

  • MBP
  • Textmate
  • Firefox 3
  • Safari
  • Parallels (for testing in IE)
  • Apple Terminal
  • Apple Mail
  • Quicksilver

grep, vi, perl, dozens of bash shortcuts. and my personal favourite for code review : “cvs diff | mate”

Visualizing 4.5 years of Flickr development

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We were impressed with Michael Ogawa’s code_swarm project, so were understandably excited when he made the source available (under the GPL v3). We sprang into action, avoiding the real work we were supposed to be doing and created some visualizations of the main Flickr subversion repository.

In this visualization, blue represents PHP, green is HTML, red is Java, purple is CSS and JavaScript, Cyan is Flash and ActionScript, with yellow filling in for everything else.

Myles took it a step further, using the tool to visualize our internal bug tracking system. In this movie, each node represents an issue, flashing red as it was opened, orange as it was assigned, blue as we argued about what to do and final green when it was resolved.

This required a little modification of the software to allow for states on nodes, so that the node color can change as the state changes. Myles has also been working on some modifications to improve upon the abrupt endings. New movies might get posted here if they’re awesome enough.

We’re hard at work (well, sort-of-work) thinking up new things to visualize and new ways to present the data. If you have some bright ideas, why not post them in the code forum.