I’ve been doing software development for my friend Erik for a while now. It’s been going well, but I’m sort of bound by time constraints (I have a day job and kids, as well as commitments to developing my art in music and origami) and he’s been budget bound (small business owner). We worked out an arrangement to trade studio time for software development, but since my record is nearly done so is that deal. Erik had the idea to begin outsourcing the development, which would put me in the role of architect/designer/team lead and (potentially/hypothetically) triple our output as far as software dev productivity goes.
As a prerequisite to sharing the code, we needed to get the project under source control. I remember a few months back my friend Nick blogging about how to set up a GIT server. I thought this might be something I could do, but what a time suck and a hassle. As it turns out Erik is a big believer in the whole software-as-service thing. He’s using a service (odesk.com) to line up offshore developers, and he’s even trying to convince to use a service to help on my next album.
The thing is, he’s not really into my drum sounds, which is not too surprising, since they’re all redended MIDI parts, jammed using the four-finger method and/or step recorded by yours truly. They sound a heck of a lot better than say They Might Be Giants, who used a similar technique back in the day, but fall short of a really good real drummer. And the cymbals in particular are a bit thin samplewise. So Erik is like, “Man, somewhere out there is a drummer who’s just killer, who will nail your tracks and bring a whole new level of energy. You send him a file of your song, and he’ll send you back an amazing drum part.” And this really sounds not far from the truth. I’ve had good experiences collaborating over the net with my brother to create our last album, and on this album with my friend John, who’s just recently hung out a shingle to do mastering as a service over the internet.
As to the question of source control, Erik had a friend who turned us onto source-control-as-a-service at cvsdude.com, a.k.a Codesion. The cost is pretty low — on the level of your basic web hosting service, and they have an admin interface to let you set up source repositories, bug/feature tracking, and to add users and set access control. Totally worth it as far as the time it saved for me not having to do all that by hand. I was able to fairly quickly create a repository, upload the source, and set up version control in my IDE on another machine to confirm it works as advertised, then checkout the source, make some changes and commit the new version. So it’s all humming along quite nicely.
Of course the project up to now has just been living on my local machine, so there’s a whole cycle of organization, cleanup and documentation ahead before some third party developer can jump in. And the other thing is, before y’all get all drooling over the idea that the day of software-as-a-service has really arrived, Codesion is still just another scrappy startup trying to get by like the rest of us. At first I was taken in by their slick web interface and their more-human-than-human support/sales bot, but the illusion was soon shattered. I had signed up for a trial account to see if they were legit, and then Erik went ahead and creates a permanent account. The problem is, for some reason (like a flaw in their database design) they don’t’ allow the same email address on two different accounts, so every time I tried to log in I got an error and a nastygram from their server to my inbox. Their tech support cleared it up by nerfing my trial account, but this is disappointing because at some point I’d like to get the Foldinator under version control, but I don’t want to get a new email address just to appease these guys.