Inside Job
Over the years, we’ve taken pride in making our tools, product and development process, as open and transparent as possible. Our tools (Bugzilla, Litmus, Wiki) are publicly accessible, our source code open (svn) and we’ve blogged on many occasions about our Agile practices.
Today we’re taking a step further by publishing our Development Survival Guide. This presentation is an internal step-by-step guide that we take new engineers thru during their orientation. It’s a good summary of what to expect on a day-to-day basis as an engineer working at Songbird (other than daily Fussball tournament and unfettered access to the beer stocked mini-fridge). It’s your opportunity to take a peek from within.
Want to get even closer? Apply for one of our openings.
Download Songbird Development Survival Guide 1.2 in pdf.
It would be useful to provide a downloadable pdf as well. Right now, downloading from slideshare.net is broken (and is tedious anyway)
Thx
@Gregory. Thanks, tedious it is indeed. Direct link to pdf added. Did not realize Snoopy had a penchant for baguette ;)
I was hoping this would show the tools you use to actually write your code. This looks like a guide to testing and planning and releasing and documenting.
Does everyone there use Notepad and a compiler on the command line? My impression of Songbird is that the largest hurdle isn’t Trac or Bugzilla, but actually writing and maintaining code, being able to easily jump from source file to source file in order to look at logic, and then building the damn thing. Do you folks use an IDE? When you have a process that goes through 5 different javascript files, do you actually hunt from file to file? When you make changes, do you save and then run a commandline build script?
That would make an awesome survival guide.
@Martin
There’s no real standardized set of developer tools that our developers will use. However, here’s a quick list of what’s most popular in house for editing code (the list is no particular order): Visual Studio (with or without VisualAssist), Eclipse, vim, XCode, Komodo Edit.
The IDE may or may not integrate with the build system. For the most part we all run the build system in a separate terminal window.
Source code management is also done on the command line by most people. SVN is the primary. Some folks will use GIT for branching their own codebase so they can more easily work on multiple patches at the same time. TortoiseSVN gets some use by our Windows guys but it’s not as popular as the command line tool. Mostly because Tortoise isn’t useful when merging between branches for us.
For finding stuff, we have an OpenGrok server set up at http://src.songbirdnest.com. It comes in very handy as you can imagine.
Our build system is all on the command line and is somewhat like the Mozilla build system. It is possible to use the Mozilla Build Tools (for Windows) to get up and running to build Songbird.
And to answer your last question, most of the time people will hit ’save’ and compile using the build script (even JS needs to go through the build process although it is a simple file copy step).
@Georges > thank you for the link, and well he has :)
Actually.. I wouldn’t mind seeing a text that explains more about messing with core (and shows the exact steps followed for adding a real feature (or fixing a real bug).
When will the ipod add-on be fixed ? i want to get back to using songbird with my ipod
Nice, will take a look. I have read a little about SB’s architecture and I find it beautiful although I believe it’s performance – specially UI’s (maybe it’s XUL, XPCOM or Gecko’s fault) – has yet a lot to be improved. I have looked at your jobs and the C++ is interesting but the 3 years of heavy experience and knowledge of Mozilla’s APIs really keep me away from it. I’d say it’s not an easy to fill position, maybe this is for someone from Mozilla Labs or Miro?
HOLY SMOKE
well done, i will start with that
few months ago, i downloaded songbird and was very disappointed because of many errors on a lot of songs
today, i said i need a media player, but which one, monkey crap ? hum i really want the bird actually
so i went to download songbird, i wanted a portable version because all of my music is on an external hard drive and i move a lot, so it is a shame that you guys dont do portable, because i like light and easy stuff, anyway i found one one portableapps.com version 1.4.3
i just love it,
very easy to use, i am quite good with computer but after 5 minutes, i went everywhere, touch everything, so simple and userfriendly
i really like to menu (espicially the view menu, so easy, i hate when they put 50 functions that you dont need)
then the purple rain, how come some people hate it, i love it
i dont like the picture of the splash screen, u2 on low quality picture is really bad, a logo of the bird would be better
i installed songbird mainly to get the lyrics to improve my english, it works fine, the only problem is on one song, which is the same name as the album name, it displays only the name of the song and album, weird
also the mash tape, (i really want it but didnt install the add-on at the beginning but really easy to find and install, simple, i love it) it does not resize properly when the lyric are display on the side, and the problem is that there is no scroll bar on the mash tape
i like the player controls menu, display on the top or bottom
i am going to be a loyal user of songbird, just hope that it will remain light and simple as now because i hate huge software JUST to play music
thank you so much for the hard work
When will the windows 7 compatible version come out? cmon! I’ve been waiting for so long … I’m tired of using stupid media players! I want songbird already!!!
@MKLOL
Songbird works fine in Win7, the warning is just there because it hasn’t fully been tested by the dev team. I’ve been using it in Win7 for a long time and haven’t experienced any real difficulties.
@katana346
Maybe for you. Songbird crashes in Win7 if i do some things. Also it somehow manages to mix the lyrics(wrong song and artist) and the album artwork ( wrong album and artist ). It’s clearly not working for me.
@Mklol, did you select “file” as the source for album art? Anyway, works here..
No jobs in Australia :(
@MKLOL
What causes crashes? I’d like to test and see if I have the same problems.
The mix-up issues are odd, I’ve never experienced anything like that.
@MKLOL
If you can reproduce the crash, please file a bug http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com and if you can add the crash id, that would help us expedite a fix. Here is some more information on where to find crash reports http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Docs/Locating_Crash_Reporter
Alternatively, if you feel adventurous, you can give the latest development version a spin and see if that solves your problem: http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/
@katana346 It crashed when i was changing a song or looking for something in the playlist. It didn’t crash since I’ve re-started using it (4 hours or so) but from the first few seconds it started mixing the cover art AGAIN !
@Georges Ok, when it’ll crash again(if it crashes) I’ll do that…
The lyrics add-on is not working. I don’t know why :( . I still really really want a win7 full compatibility version!
@Andrew Luecke
I had the cover art from the same version of Songbird only in Win Xp…
Sorry you decided to drop support for Linux. Just loaded the program several months ago and will be unloading it as Linux is the only OS I run (by preference.)
Good luck.
Hi there,
as you deactivated commenting on the original Post “Songbird Singing A New Tune” ‘m using THIS post in order to express my deep disappointment that you guys discontinue the Linux line. Not funny at all.
Happy mainstreaming,
Jan / Switzerland
such a good thing closing comments….(irony)
such a good thing leaving linux… (irony)
such a good thing using user’s time to develop your software and then turn the back on them… (irony)
Giorgio