{"id":1524,"date":"2013-01-11T11:35:58","date_gmt":"2013-01-11T17:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/?p=1524"},"modified":"2013-03-15T21:46:31","modified_gmt":"2013-03-16T02:46:31","slug":"adding-work-to-social-not-social-to-work-irc-chatops-and-hubot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/2013\/01\/11\/adding-work-to-social-not-social-to-work-irc-chatops-and-hubot\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding work to social, not social to work: IRC, #ChatOps, and Hubot"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently interviewed by TechCrunch’s Alex Williams about the ongoing importance of IRC as a communications medium<\/a> and wanted to publish the broader context of what I wrote here.<\/p>\n

The standard for real-time communication in free\/open-source software is\u00a0IRC<\/strong>, primarily on the FreeNode and OFTC networks. Although this is partly historical (IRCwas invented in 1988), it’s also because it has features appreciated by developers \u2014 such as a wide variety of clients with vastly differing interfaces, an open protocol, and server federation so loss of a single node doesn’t take down the network.<\/p>\n

IRC\u00a0represents the social side of distributed development.<\/strong> If there’s an open-source project that you need help with, and you want to speak with the developers or just ask a question, chances are good that there’s an\u00a0IRC\u00a0channel for it on FreeNode \u2014 project-sponsored or informal. Pingdom published a\u00a0piece<\/a>\u00a0that shows the growth of FreeNode’s\u00a0IRC\u00a0network despite an overall shrinkage of\u00a0IRC\u00a0use. Some companies with significant participation in open-source software development, such as Red Hat, even maintain internal\u00a0IRC\u00a0networks.<\/p>\n

Because of\u00a0IRC’s open protocol and heavy use by developers, automated interfaces to\u00a0IRC\u00a0called\u00a0bots<\/a>\u00a0have become popular<\/strong> over the years. Initially they were simply used to maintain control of an\u00a0IRC\u00a0channel (i.e. chat room) on networks without the concept of channel registration, but they’re regularly used in the context of software development to do things like\u00a0report every commit<\/a>\u00a0or every new bug. Two of the most popular extensible bots are\u00a0Eggdrop<\/a>\u00a0(Tcl) and\u00a0Supybot<\/a>\u00a0(Python).<\/p>\n

#ChatOps<\/a> and Hubot<\/a>, which I first learned about at PuppetConf last fall,\u00a0are part of the next generation of bot, designed not just for reporting and queries but also for taking action<\/strong>. Although Hubot was initially written for 37signals’ Campfire chat rather than\u00a0IRC\u00a0(an adapter now\u00a0exists<\/a>), 37signals even\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0Campfire at its launch as\u00a0IRC\u00a0for the masses, so the distinction is unimportant. The concept of #ChatOps is based around Hubot’s use primarily as a sysadmin tool rather than a developer tool, thus integrating chatrooms and IT operations into #ChatOps.<\/p>\n

Although many companies\u00a0today\u00a0are focused on adding “social” into their work products, fewer are adding more work-focused capabilities into social products.<\/strong> Hubot represents a successful example of the latter.<\/p>\n

Disclosure: Red Hat is a client, GitHub has been one, and 37signals is not.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"by-sa\"<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently interviewed by TechCrunch’s Alex Williams about the ongoing importance of IRC as a communications medium and wanted to publish the broader context of what I wrote here. The standard for real-time communication in free\/open-source software is\u00a0IRC, primarily on the FreeNode and OFTC networks. Although this is partly historical (IRCwas invented in 1988),<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18,20,13,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-distributed-development","category-open-source","category-social"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p23Tsn-oA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}