Simpltry

I have really been enjoying Yehuda Katz’s series on Rails 3. His latest post is more like a diary entry, but to me it gives the most transparency into a major refactoring I have ever seen, open source or otherwise. I know it probably isn’t fun for him to do this everyday, but I bet in the long run it will save him time when answering “why did you do X?” questions.

I think this transparency pairs very well with the open source philosophy of honesty and openness. Now not only can we see the code, we can also see his motivations for the changes. When he breaks backward compatibility, I will be able to reread these posts and say yup that makes sense or conversely nope that wasn’t worth it. But at least we will have a starting point for discussion, rather than leaving me to speculate.