Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

7 items tagged “collaboration”

2020

I was wrong. CRDTs are the future (via) Joseph Gentle has been working on collaborative editors since being a developer on Google Wave back in 2010, later building ShareJS. He’s used Operational Transforms throughout, due to their performance and memory benefits over CRDTs (Conflict-free replicated data types)—but the latest work in that space from Martin Kleppmann and other researchers has seen him finally switch allegiance to these newer algorithms. As a long-time fan of collaborative editing (ever since the Hydra/SubEthaEdit days) I thoroughly enjoyed this as an update on how things have evolved over the past decade. # 28th September 2020, 9:03 pm

A group of software engineers gathered around a whiteboard are a joint cognitive system. The scrawls on the board are spatial cues for building a shared model of a complex system.

Eric Dobbs # 13th February 2020, 6:48 pm

2018

Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency (via) This is smart: the “golden path” approach to encouraging a standard stack within a large engineering organization. If you build using the components on the golden path you get guaranteed ongoing support and as much free monitoring/tooling as can possibly be provided. I also really like the suggestion that this should be managed by a “council” of senior engineers with one member of the council rotated out every quarter to keep things from getting stale and cabal-like. # 2nd December 2018, 7:40 pm

2017

Looking for a modern day wiki for a group project

GitHub offers a wiki for each repository. It’s free for public projects (no need to upload any code, just create a repo and ignore the other tabs) of you can pay $7 monthly for private ones.

[... 87 words]

2009

Last night I woke up at 2am and realized that there was a fundamental problem with cursor preservation in today’s real-time collaborative applications [...] MobWrite now has what I believe to be the most advanced cursor preservation algorithm available.

Neil Fraser # 14th August 2009, 10:38 am

google-mobwrite. Neal Fraser’s terrifyingly clever differential synchronization algorithm (for SubEthaEdit-style collaboration over the web) is now available as an open source Python and JavaScript library. # 24th January 2009, 11:55 pm

2008

Google apps for your newsroom. How the LJ World team use online tools like Google Spreadsheet, Swivel, ManyEyes and Google MyMaps to collaborate with the newsroom and build data-heavy applications even faster. # 7th January 2008, 9:24 pm