Software development
Linus Torvalds on Git
While distributed source code management tools like Git, Mercurial, Monotone and Bazaar (which some Drupal developers use) offer advantages over CVS or SVN, they are not as accessible or well-supported. Drupal developers and Drupal designers are not Linux kernel hackers, and for many of them CVS is the biggest barrier to entry. Without desktop integration for both Windows and the Mac (like TurtoiseCVS or MacCVSClient offer), I don't see how we can migrate away from CVS without leaving half of our community behind ...
Not to mention the fact that our entire release management system is built on top of CVS. It would be a lot of work to switch that to another system.
Creating passionate users
Like many, I'm a long-time reader of Creating Passionate Users, a blog co-authored by Kathy Sierra. Last month at Euro OSCON I had the opportunity to attend a 3 hour tutorial by Kathy Sierra, and now I can't wait for the "Creating Passionate Users" book to come out.
I'm a fan.
I'm a fan because over the past year, Kathy has permanently changed my perspective on user experience (and because she managed to put in words what I've known intuitively for a long time). To give you an idea, I've included the blog posts (and graphs) that had the most impact on me.
Excessive dogfooding and zealotism
In software development one is eating his own dog food when he is using its own product (i.e. the software he develops). I'm using Drupal for my personal website, so I'm eating my own dogfood. Drupal.org is using Drupal, so the Drupal community is eating its own dogfood. Many developers in the Drupal community, or the Open Source community in general, eat their own dog food.
There are a number of well-known advantages to eating our own dogfood: it provides evidence that Drupal works and that we are confident using it ourselves. Furthermore, as users of our own software, we help discover bugs and identify shortcomings. When developers are users there is plenty of incentive to fix bugs and the feedback loop doesn't become much shorter than that. For those reasons, eating your own dogfood is a common strategy in software development.
