A song for the lovers

Lately I’ve been finding myself amazed about the social turn that programming has taken in quite a while.

I started growing as a software developer thanks to the Internet, it and the people on mailing lists/forums/irc have shaped my skills, career and made me discover a lot of great things. I owe the Internet a lot. As Tim Bray says in his After Branding essay:

You are whatever the Net says you are. Deal with it.

It is pointless to start talking about what good open source and version control tools have done to the social side of programming because it’s there to see for everybody. Websites like Sourceforge and Freshmat were everything we talked about in the old days.

Nowadays Distributed version control is taking over and the reasons why are clear: we need to be more and more social and what better way to exchange knowledge than to distribute code?

If I could I’d change name of those tools to “social version control”.

What I love about sites like GitHub and Bitbucket is that they are trying to build real social networks around source code, every developer’s currency. I love it. The what is not new but it’s the how (like how easy it is to contribute) that changes everything.

I look forward to social programming.

ps. on Twitter there is an amazing community of software developers exchanging small tips or links every day. You MUST be on Twitter, really. I am.