Release Early and Often

Release Early, Release Often! Back to my favorite conglomerate of papers written by Eric S. Raymond. This segment talks about the development model of the Linux kernel, as well as a common development model for most open source projects.

Back in the early days of software development it was common to work with the Cathedral building development, this way your early buggy versions do not disgruntle users or even change their workflow. The idea that the objective was for users to run into the least amount of bugs kept this perpetual cycle of one leader programming and slow patching schedules going for a while. It wasn't until Linux started gaining momentum that another way of developing code seemed to work better. Linus treated his users as co-developers, bug hunters, and documentarians.

His use of leveraging users to let them collaborate allowed him to pick ideas and incorporate them (if the user didn't already incorporate it themselves). This turnaround sometimes lead to releasing a kernel update more than once a day. This helped motivate the co-developers, either from their sense of the gift culture that open source is now known for, or for the ego satisfying love that hackers have when their name is on a project. This lead to better code with the idea that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" otherwise known as "Linus's Law". If the project dev group is large enough a bug will be caught faster, and bugs will have a higher probability of having a quick and obvious fix to someone who might have seen that type of problem before.

Releasing early and releasing often is most likely going to be the development model for Obsidian. Hopefully builds will be twice a month at first, and when the project becomes more stable the ability to refactor parts that we know we want to change (like the methodMap) can come later. We just need to find a collection of developers that like our project and will continue to use it even if we are not developing it anymore. I hope the original team will continue to work on it, but the open source community is already used to people moving on and new people taking over, we just need to find our developers first.

Speaking of Obsidian, we have a week to go before POSSCON and our release of the code to the public. The poster now has cool graphics to show how each pattern works. The wiki is tentatively declared done, but as it is a wiki it will never be done. Something will always need to be changed, something else will always need to be updated, it is just the name of the game when it comes to an evolving project. The documentation needs to change to keep up.

Lets just hope it doesn't need to be changed that much.