Hey folks, still fairly new to the community (my intro: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CC2JRGVLK/p1629894229069200 ) So we are a tiny team building real-time version control called Sturdy. Here is a quick demo video I recorded this week for the first time. The main feature I am showcasing is how easy it is to try each other’s work in progress code. Would love to hear what you think. 🙂

Great demo, congrats!

Big part of this is to normalize “dumb changes”. It’s just how dev happens. Kind of like drafting stuff in Google Docs. With that said, we are adding things like access controls etc 😛

Something that would be cool (disregard feature request 😄) would be to tell sturdy to take a snapshot of the code every couple of seconds and provide a "player" to replay the changed, for tutorials or live coding it would be great

This type of feature is totally feasible - we have a snapshot at pretty much every file save action. A tricky component is how to visualize the replay nicely - like sometimes you write code just to undo it shortly after. But maybe after pruning that…

which change do you want to promote with sturdy? you mentioned easy to test other people's code and that's great, it seems you may enable a different kind of collaboration/code review too? do you have a different development workflow in mind?

I think that by making some operations way easier, the ‘default’ behaviour of people also change. For example, today, a Pull Request code review ends up either a nitpick fest or… if the code is actually complex, you get an “LGTM” rubberstamp. We are a team of 3 at Sturdy, and we are running each other’s code very frequently to discuss ideas or as conversation starters.

I have long wanted to do what you suggest @Mariano Guerra and have live coding be recorded in real time so you can play it back; letting you find those key moments when things were working well.

@Chris Maughan hmm, this is not the idea. I wouldn’t really want to make a tracking tool for managers.

I like that; it's a fun idea. It does at least give some indication that a developer has periods of intense work vs down time.

Nice work, this stakes out an interesting space between GitHub and realtime pairing collaboration models. While multiplayer everything (seeing others' cursors, etc.) is all the rage, this might go in directions that are better for full-remote async collaboration It also seems to share some of the ideas of trying to improve on the mental models of Git that were explored by the Gitless project

Spot on Joe. I am very interested in how tools shape the work dynamic of people. For example what Slack does for communication in comparison to email. A lot of the UX features we add are meant to create a relaxed “its ok to experiment” vibe.

Nice presentation! What software do you use for the screencast?

@hvrosen Somehow I missed your comment, sorry for this late reply. I used QuickTime on Mac, it's actually really handy