I’m unique among my coworkers, in that I’m not a developer/programmer. This is a good thing, after all, because I’m the writer and not a programmer; but as a “workflow” guy and a student of software development one thing that I’ve been particularly struck by since taking this job is how well I’ve been able to collaborate with coworkers who come from a completely different background/field and furthermore how helpful this as been to my work and development as a writer. This post is going to contain some of these lessons and experiences.

For starters, we’re all pretty big fans of git. As git is one of the most interesting and productive technologies that I use regularly, this is really nice. Not only does everyone live in plain text format, but they mostly use the same version control system I do. I’ve definitely had jobs and collaborations in the past few years (since I made the transition to pure text) where I’ve had to deal with .doc files, so this is a welcome change.

I’ve long thought that working in plain text format has been a really good thing for me as a writer. In a text editor there’s only you and the text. All of the bullshit about styles and margins and the like that you are forced to contend with in “Office” software is a distraction, and so by just interacting with text, by exactly (and only) what I write in the file, I’ve been able to concentrate on the production of text, leaving only “worthwhile distractions” to the writing process.

Working with programmers, makes this “living in plain text” thing I do, not seem quite so weird, and that’s a good thing for the collaboration but--for me, at least--it represents an old lesson about writing: use tools that you’re very comfortable with, and deal with output/production only when you’re very ready for it. Good lesson. I might have taken it to the extreme with the whole emacs thing, but it works for me, and I’m very happy with it.

But, using git, with other people has been a great lesson, and a great experience, and I’m getting the opportunity to use git in new ways, which have been instructive for me--both in terms of the technology, but also in terms of my writing process.

For instance, when ever I do a git pull (which asks the server for any new published changes and then merges them (often without help from me) with my working coppy) and see that a coworker has changed something, I tend to inspect the differences (eg. diffs) contained in the pull. Each commit (set of changes; indeed each object, but that’s tangential) in git are assigned a unique identifier (a cryptographic hash) and you can, with the following command generate a visual representation of the changes between any two objects:

git diff  6150726..956BC46

If you have colors turned on in git (to colorize output; only the first line affects diffs, but I find the others are nice too):

git config --global color.diff auto
git config --global color.status auto
git config --global color.branch auto

This generates a nice colorized output and of all the changes between the two revisions, or points in history as specified. The diff, is just the output of the format that git uses to apply a set of changes to a base set of files so it displays a full copy of what the lines used to look like at the first point in time, and then new lines which represent what the lines look like in the second point in time, as well as contextual unchanged lines to anchor the changes to, when needed. Colorized the old content are darker (orange?) and the new content is brighter (yellow? green?), contextual anchors are in white.

The result is that when you’re reviewing edits you can see exactly what was changed, and what it “used to be” without needing to manually compare new and old files, and also without the risk of getting too wound up in the context.

Not only is this the best way I’ve ever received feedback, in terms of ease, of review and clarity (when you can compare new to old, in very specific chunks, the rationale for changes is almost always evident), but also in what it teaches me about my writing. I can see what works and what doesn’t work, I can isolate feedback on a specific line from feedback on the entire document.

While I’ve only really been able to do this for a few weeks, not only do I think that it’s productive in this context, but that I think it might be an effective way for people to receive feedback and learn about writing. People involved in the polishing of prose (professional editors, writers, etc) often have all sorts of ways to trick themselves in attending to the mechanics of specific texts (on the scale of 7-10 words) stuff like reading backwards, reading paragraphs/sentences out of order. Reading from beginning to end, but reading sentences backwards, and so forth. Reviewing diffs allows you to separate big picture concerns about the narrative from structural concerns, and some how the lesson--at least for me--works.

Programmers, of course, use diffs regularly to “patch” code and communicate changes, and the review patches and diffs are a key part of the way programmers collaborate. I wonder if programmers learn by reviewing diffs in the same sort of way.

This will probably slowly develop in to a longer series of posts, but I think that’s enough for you. I have writing to do, after all :)

Cheers!