Here's the actual changelog, btw: http://changelog.friendfeed.com/

I've considered doing this for a while, too. I went to far as to make a post-commit hook script for subversion to post to twitter, but it was friends-only so only my collaborator and I could see it.

Even better would be to post the diffs :-P

Would people be interested in seeing the svn changelog on my current project?

Very cool!

PS: paul, what do you guys use on the backend? I see you guys use nginx (great choice). What else?

Python, mostly. There's a little bit of c++ to make some things fast, but we're trying to minimize that.

Paul, Do you guys use any web framework for python ?

It's custom, but apparently similar to a few of the popular ones.

"Paul recently suggested that we could save ourselves a lot of time writing blog posts if we just sent out our changelists from Mercurial"

Wow. I mean, wow!! This is a great way to get technical people invested in the development of your app!

choice exerpts:

  changeset:   50bb94a18270
  user:        bret
  date:        2008-02-26 13:23:50
  description: Undo shitty code.

   ---

  Sat, Feb 23: Let's redo our entire UI two days before launch

:)

I'd love to set an ethographer loose on this, and see what insights they have about how programmers and programming works. Might make a nice PhD thesis for someone :-)

There have already been a bunch of academics studying the version control histories of major open source projects, for example as a means to gain insight into why open source development "works" (i.e. is able to produce very high-quality software). One of the cool things about studying an OSS project is that everything is public, and the vast majority of the communication happens via an archived, digital medium: you can correlate VCS history with mailing list activity with bug tracker activity with website traffic logs, for example.

An example paper related to this idea is http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhanivonhippelusersupport... ("How Open Source Software Works: "Free" User-to-User Assistance", studying Apache)

When I think about doing this myself I immediately start coming up with flimsy excuses for why I can't. I believe a lot of doing a startup well is daring to put yourself out there to be judged. This is right in line with that idea (to an extreme). Brave and commendable.

damn, that's a lot of commits. I only usually make 3-5 a day, but then again I only work on my work stuff 8 hours a day, too.

I find it depends on the type of work I am doing.

Creating a new module - a daily commit. Bug fixing - a zillion commits. GUI work - a zillion commits.

Since it was right before prelaunch, and presumably a lot of GUI/bug fixes, seems right.

modern cold war