Before a car crashed into me while walking across Masonic and Page Street, I loved to rock climb. My right hand has yet to heal to the point where I can rock climb without feeling intense amounts of pain. In rock climbing, the term, belay, refers to a technique where a spotter carefully controls the rope so that the climber doesn’t fall very far.
I’ve felt that I’ve worked on projects where although I was part of a team, the team didn’t work with eachother. Management and client demands would very often force coders to free climb without the benefit of belaying. When a coder would “take a fall,” she would do so without the benefit of a belay, and the results would often be catastrophic.
The Codebelay project is designed so that coders can manage projects simply and safely. No coder should have to work without the safety of a belay. This project is guided by 3 simple principles which allows the requirements of simplicity and safety to be met:
- Coders should know who’s working on their project and what their roles are. This sounds simple enough, but often many projects are managed by client bureaucrats. A coder should have a list of contacts that – although reflects the sorry state of heavy management projects – will allow the coder to successfully find the missing pieces of the puzzle by contacting the appropriate stakeholders.
- A coding project requires metaphorical building materials. Thus, perfect asset management is necessary if code is to be built and delivered on time. I’ve added an asset manager to Codebelay.
- Coders, who develop web applications, often lack a test harness or QA tool, for making sure that a web app can “go live.” Codebelay allows coders who work on the web to store links that can be tested. A simple user interface tells the coder either “all green” for the launch of a site, or at least one, red “stopper,” to alert the coder that something needs to be fixed.
I was inspired to work on this project after reading many of the 37signals blog posts as well as Eric S. Raymond’s classic, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This blog documents the Codebelay project, and I hope that someone out there finds it useful.
