I telecommute 100% of the time at my current company. We make use of git and skype to communicate. If we need to share a bunch of code, we use remote branches (grb makes this super easy).
But when its only one file, the overhead is too much.
“Wait, wait. Let me create a remote branch - now I’m committing, now I’m pushing to the origin - there you go! Go ahead and pull.”
This can really break up the work flow.
To highlight what’s changed in the file and share it with my coworker, is this too much to ask? Now, of course, we could just pipe the diff into a file but then how do we transfer it? Use email? Ugh.
Definitely not.
Instead, let’s use a nice web service and paste two files. (On mac os x, check out cat some_file_name | pbcopy. very nifty). With one url, we can both insure we’re looking at the exact same diff.
Enter roseanne. If you’re a solo user, roseanne allows you to run a pure javascript diff (thanks to Chas Emrick. I “ported” it to use prototype). Or, you can submit the diff to the server.
Since Chas based his js diff lib off of Python’s sequence matcher and Test::Unit::Diff::SequenceMatcher is based off the same for the server side, I generate the JSON and store it in a couchdb at cloudant to save the view for later and share with others.
The app is hosted at heroku and is a rails app. Try it yourself.
Since the app is basically a simple proxy, I’m thinking of replacing it with a Sinatra app. Any thoughts? Is there something I could do to make it better?
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