As you and I know, effective remote collab is possible, but it takes more effort than making collocated collab work. I wouldn't recommend it for just any group. Maybe it's good to have the default advice be “keep” everyone together” – but now we're right back at catering to the lowest common denominator. The annoying thing about enshrining collocation as a “best practice” in an ostensibly “cutting edge” context is that now shops that can do distributed collab are going to be asked to justify their choices, and/or seen as higher-risk.

And given the people involved in the RMM, I don't see a “distributed development” practice gaining much traction on the list. The companies involved seem quite pleased with themselves and each other for keeping all their developers together in one place.

Which sucks, because I genuinely believe that distributed development is a big part of the future of software. Not just because it's what I want to do; but because it's a more efficient, sustainable way of connecting talent to work without expensive, polluting, community-straining mobility.

As you and I know, effective remote collab is possible, but it takes more effort than making collocated collab work. I wouldn't recommend it for just any group. Maybe it's good to have the default advice be “keep” everyone together” – but now we're right back at catering to the lowest common denominator. The annoying thing about enshrining collocation as a “best practice” in an ostensibly “cutting edge” context is that now shops that can do distributed collab are going to be asked to justify their choices, and/or seen as higher-risk.

And given the people involved in the RMM, I don't see a “distributed development” practice gaining much traction on the list. The companies involved seem quite pleased with themselves and each other for keeping all their developers together in one place.

Which sucks, because I genuinely believe that distributed development is a big part of the future of software. Not just because it's what I want to do; but because it's a more efficient, sustainable way of connecting talent to work without expensive, polluting, community-straining mobility.

But: “Practice #3: Everyone Together. This is an incredibly backward value to be espousing in 2009.”

I beg to differ. There can be serious competitive and qualitative advantages to following that practice and really utilizing the high-bandwidth communication it provides, just as there can be advantages to not following it. These are tradeoffs that many(most?) firms make without even really realizing what they are trading off. At any rate, it seems to me that there's nothing stopping anyone from putting a whole slew of recommended practices for remote workers onto the list and endorsing what's worked out best for them.

And, on a more serious note, I do hope that someone posts a “practice” concerning the Sampsonite Theory of programming that you and John Trupiano were discussing a month or two back. From my experience, I know that I can and will endorse that, and there are at least a couple of rails shops that I can confirm adhere to it with at least some of their developers.

If you think about it rationally, Hashrocket is already very popular and successful. Our track record of transparency and assisting other firms and individuals is beyond reproach. There is simply no need for us to spend what amounts to tens of thousands of dollars in labor to create a self-serving promotional site.

Since you brought it up… The emphasis of the site is the practices. That's why it was no big deal to remove the firm page from the navigation. The firms page that was little more than a scaffolded list. Hashrocket only appeared at the top of that page since we had the most data in the system, an artifact of our position as initial alpha testers of the site.

I do admit to naivete about the depths of cynicism among some people in the community. It's disappointing, but at the same time, provides strong motivation for me to prove the naysayers wrong.

What I have see here is an attempt by Obie and Hashrocket to create a club, where only the bigger shops can truly have any real influence. If I am a small shop I can choose to do my own thing, but the club has already biased the community and potential customers on what the best practices should be.

It's kind of like when you're at a presentation and the presenter asks “who here has done x?” and you see a few hands go up, so you put yours up even though you've only read a blog or two about it….you just don't want to be left out.

Just because you do #standup doesn't mean that it's a positive thing. Your team needs to understand how to approach it, what things are useful to share, etc. Otherwise. you just wasted 15 minutes of productivity for your entire team.