2010/9/4 Robert Leverington <rob...@rhl.me.uk>: > In the past all paid developers worked remotely (at least, not in the > same office as one another), and there still are paid developers who > work remotely. Additionally, all volunteers work remotely. Based on my > experience with MediaWiki I would say that development in the past was > significantly more efficient and community involved than it is currently. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_prompter_hoc
The fact that we have scalability (in terms of code review) and transparency issues now that we have a number of devs in one office while we didn't have them back in the day when there was only one dev at the office doesn't mean the concentration of developers in the office *caused* these issues, much less that undoing said concentration will fix them. For instance, the activity level in the MW SVN repository grew significantly about 2 years ago if memory serves [1] , and our code review infrastructure shrunk by 50% with Brion's departure just under a year ago rather than being expanded. This has to be one of the main causes of the current code review situation, and I don't believe concentrating devs in the office made much if any difference here. Certain transparency issues that have been mentioned probably are related to having an office, but you'll still need to make sound arguments to support this notion (fortunately, some people have done this) rather than committing a logical fallacy. You can't just blame any arbitrary event that occurred in the past 5 years for everything that's worse now than it was 5 years ago without backing up that assertion with convincing arguments. Roan Kattouw (Catrope) [1] These numbers blow my mind every so often: when I started in July 2007 we were in the r26000s vs. the r72000s today, even though the SVN history goes back to 2001. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
