It’s been now two weeks that I started at Skype. I did expect a lot from this company and I haven’t been disappointed. Ambiance is relaxed but very hard-working. Motivation is the highest I have seen in a company and things are moving really fast.

I could go on about many great things, but let’s just mention the pleasure it is to use the right tools. You know, the simple tools that get the job done, that make you a little bit more productive instead of shamefully slowing you down. One the main quality of Skype (the product) is its simplicity and this applies also in the tools we use daily.

Take email. Of course it’s not like we use email that much anymore, but it’s still useful. There isn’t an Exchange server that locks you to Microsoft, but a standard mail server supporting IMAP over SSL. Suddenly you see employees with Mac and Linux boxes!

Of course Skype doesn’t use Clearcase, the source control management software from IBM-Rational. Clearcase is one of the most horrible “tool” I have ever seen. Every developer hates it. It’s so amazingly expensive, so having to use a tool that slows you down and that costs several months of your salary every year makes you hate it even more. Worst, Clearcase implementations often create so many branches and versions of your files that merges happen all the time, and all this automatic merging “automatically” adds bugs to your code! Well, here we use CVS and it’s so fast, so simple, so efficient… it’s amazing, it actually doesn’t slow me down.

Strangely too, there are no names of shared drives to remember in order to find documents. Project management files, functional specifications, etc, just everything is on the company wiki, and it cannot get any simpler. Everybody uses the wiki, and is happy with it. The information there is up-to-date for most of it. Nobody has outdated specifications on his laptop. Mac and Linux users aren’t excluded. And everybody knows what a wiki is…

So now you must have guessed that the intranet doesn’t have any Internet Explorer only pages… Or that Wordpress is powering the internal “news” web site. Or that there are no stupid proxy and Internet filtering software that forbids you to access any URL with the word “forum” in it (yes, I’ve seen this).

Swearing only about the bugs in your own code and not about your tools, that’s how it should be.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 11:02 pm and is filed under General, Skype. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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