Just the other day, Duncan talked a little about how we find new talent, and share some of the benefits. He called it “sharing the love.” Today, I want to talk a bit about how Digital Eskimo shares code, too.
Of course, Digital Eskimo is very big on sharing. Everything from our work culture to our strategy planning is based on encouraging collaboration from our employees, our clients, and last—but certainly not least—our users. Even beyond this, however, the whole idea of sharing is actually central to our business model because (for instance) we proudly use free and open source software. In fact, most companies use free software in one capacity or another.
Free and open source software is great because it provides the building blocks of world-class products for none of the cost…but this isn’t going to be one of those posts that preaches about the philosophies of FLOSS. Instead, I’d like to direct your attention to two small utilities I developed in-house that I’m happy to say are now available for public use.
These are the beginnings of our code contributions back to the free software ecosystem …
First, chkrelease is a filesystem verification utility that checks to see if the right files and folders exist on a server based on a certain release of source code. This turns out to be extremely useful in verifying that every thing’s working properly on any given machine. Second, git-archive-all is a utility that creates release packages of source code (for possible use with chkrelease later) from a git repository, our source code management tool of choice; it’s useful because it gracefully handles git repositories with submodules.
While seemingly minor, I’m actually very excited about making these internal tools available to the public. In the Internet business, much more of our work is actually open source than many people realize. This is because the ability to “view source” equals open source. That’s just one reason why we hold ourselves to a higher standard and, of course, holding ourselves to a higher standard is why we wanted to make chkrelease and git-archive-all open source in the first place.
So I guess all I wanted to say was that, for us, sharing the love comes in many shapes and sizes.
