Our company is all about cool practices of how to make our workflow better and our products stunning. We strive toward a rock solid development workflow, with things like continuous integration and dedicated QA staff. We also post release notes weekly for every project to share the insight between team members. We do scrum meetings daily. But we always strive for more…
On our last retreat we decided to try a new habit: every other friday every team member can take a day off to work on any open source project. I was so excited about this idea that I decided to use my friday today, as soon as we finished some major Beanstalk updates.
Writing open source is not just fun, it’s also very important for developers. It helps us improve our communication skills, learn how to take care of projects in the long run and take responsibility. That’s why we should do it more often.
I spent my friday extracting and polishing a library that we use to render diffs in Beanstalk. I called it PrettyDiff. I made it because other tools like it were either too hard to change (html is hard coded all over the place), or didn’t have features I wanted.
Pretty Diff stands out from the crowd because it’s dead simple to customize. All HTML is concentrated in a single place, so you can quickly adjust output to your specific needs. And the code is very easy to read and covered with comments and tests. Plus it comes with built-in coloring support and copy/paste-safe line numbers. Pretty neat.
I enjoyed my Open Source Friday and I'm looking forward to the next one. Stay tuned for more goodies from the Wildbit team!