Patrick Tulskie

Every Friday we have our code reviews at BeenVerified and it is definitely a non-trivial event.  Our development team looks through the code all together and offers suggestions and ways to improve what the creator deems near-complete code.  Code reviews have become my favorite part of team based development because they offer me such a badass opportunity to learn more.  Everyone looks a problem differently and so getting insight from other people is huge because you might not consider all of your options when you’re knee deep in 1000 lines of ruby, CSS, and js all at once.

Yeah it’s great, except this Friday it didn’t happen.  Thanksgiving weekend happened instead so we pushed it to Monday.  Being the silly goose I am, I decided to get a new Macbook on Black Friday.  I restored my stuff from Time Machine, installed my Ruby Gems, and thought all was well.  Monday morning, my turn to present code came up and there was a problem with screen sharing.  Crap.  All of my code is in a git branch that is not pushed to a server yet and the time it would have taken to get to a state where we could present it from another machine would have been too much so we postponed my review until my screen sharing would work.  This was most displeasing to me.

How To Handle It Next Time.

As of late, there has been a lot of talk about bonjour in the ruby world.  There are a lot of really awesome applications that use the technology.  Take for example, gitjour.  It takes an existing git repository and makes it available to machines on the local network through bonjour.  All they would need is the gem and to type “gitjour list” in a terminal window to see what’s available.  That’s badass.

So if we had to rewind to Monday morning, what we should have done is take a functioning machine on the local network and had that person do a clone of my repository to a new working directory and then we could have screen shared that.  It would have taken a fraction of the time that it would have taken to push it to the server with my own local branch, tell someone to get a copy of my branch from the server and what branch to take.  Gitjour would have cut out all of the steps and it would have been quicker since it’s on the local network.

This thought alone makes me want to dive deeper into bonjour and figure out how to use it for various things.  If you have any good resources, post them in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. (http://twitter.com/patricktulskie)

What Was The Screen Sharing Problem?

Turns out iChat 4.0.5 doesn’t know how to view the screen of someone with iChat 4.0.6.  The new Macbook comes with 4.0.6 by default and there is no easy way to upgrade to it.  I downgraded to 4.0.2 from my Blackbook and now all is well.