http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=78731

So I have a ton of projects open right now. I'm working on, pretty well simultaneously, And a whole slew of other things. dusk and I get to work on another of my modules together, and I frequently get help from japhy and converter.

Not too long ago, I took down a whole bunch of notes about why my idea was as cool as it is. I have since lost them. This, then, is off the top of my head.

Extreme Community is...

Extreme community is what happens when you take Extreme programming (please see Kent Beck's book or Extreme programming... in perl?) for more information) and smoosh it into a community. Folks, I write redundant code. I have a pet subroutine that I have been revising for at least two years. It's now highly specialized and does everything I want it to do flawlessly. I find that from time to time, its great to just drop code like that into people's laps. It saves them an hour or two of code and does what they want.

My friend patrick told me the other day he had this great idea. He wanted to write a script to look at his hard disk, grab the mp3 names, and then query the CDDB to find the names of the tracks he was missing from the cd's that he had. Well, I have 80% of the code that does that. Now, imagine on the scale of a thousand monks. How many of us are doing the same thing? In XML Application Servers, Coyote describes an application that does almost exactly what my current client does. I obviously couldnt just give him their code, but I could contribute lots of insight into how that is done. Read on, intrepid monken...

A Vision of more productive programmers...

So imagine I decide I need a pair programmer. I've got me, but I am now desperately in need of code reviews. Who better to review that code than somebody who is working on a similar vein? Furthermore, if you put the two of us together, you get the combined mass of both of our code. So you get code done quicker, and you get more thoroughly debugged code!! Whoa! Imagine that!

Sure, sourceforge does this. But sourceforge is not a community. Its not close-knit. There arent discussion forums. There arent Code Catacombs. As tilly said in Re (tilly) 3: Licensing and Rape-Proofing your ideals.,

We, for the most part, are all friends, and get along. We're on good enough terms that we could sit down and code together. Imagine the stuff we could produce. Even if we didnt produce anything as a whole, imagine all the snippets and nuts and bolts we would produce. I have something on the order of 800mb of perl code (that is a LOT of perl code) sitting in my /devel directory. I've been thinking recently of making a cronjob to just stuff it all into a publicly readable web directory. In fact I may do that if people ask for it. It might not be useful to everyone. It might not be useful to me. But somebody might find it useful. And that saves me time, and it saves them time.

So I thought about how cool this would be and I thought to myself, well, brother dep, it would suck a lot to just dump this in vroom's lap, and you know he wont code it up. He's too busy. So, I went out and I installed the Everything Engine. I checked this software out. It seems like it could support what I'm talking about. A separate section where users could make new project nodelets and add requests for codeninjas to them and post the stuff they find useful and stuff. I'm just no good with the EE. I cant seem to figure out even beginning to develop with it.

jcwren's recent idea, Web Hosting for Monks is a good one. I propose a similar one. Code Hosting for monks. I can put up an anon ftp site where users can upload tarballs of code which can then via cron and some trickery, be exploded into hierarchial web directories. This isnt so tough to do.

I'd like to know if people are receptive to this. If I get a positive response, I will put the EE back up and allow anyone to hack on it who would like to. My webserver can handle far more hits than its bandwidth can support, though I am putting it on a T1 as of 18 May 01.

I'd also like to know if anyone has suggestions as to ways to integrate such a Code Vault with other communities.

As for security, well, I am pretty good about that kind of stuff, and I think I can handle a single anon ftp dropbox. I'm happy to give out shells for users to maintain their own dirs, but I think jcwren has that handled.

yours,
brother dep.

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.