Everyone of us knows the feeling when you are glad to find a project on sourceforge that seems to be exactly what you were looking for just to find it abandoned, outdated, unfinished or simple plain broken. That is frustrating. And in almost all cases before I’d just close the browser tab at such a point.
But now my coding went social

I started my social coding journey on bitbucket.org. Already using some code from there it was just a matter of time until I felt the need to submit a patch anyway. So I thought “let’s try this fancy stuff everyone is talking about”.
A fork and a few patches and pull requests later I must say I like it. It feels more user friendly from the source control point of view (I guess Mercurial as a distributed version control system helps here). But it feels also much more alive thanks to this social aspects. I got a list of projects and people I can follow and I can comment patches and even specific code lines of others.
And now there is ohloh.org. They even take it one more step forward. This site is not so much about the code in terms of developing but in terms of analyzing it and socializing it. I can add projects here and they try to analyze how many people are/were working on it. They apply metrics to say something about the code quality it has and how alive it is. They even got those crazy calculations how much a project is worth in respect to the work hours it took. They estimate Firefox worth $88m. But one of the most interesting aspects of ohloh is that you can even find out who else is working on similar projects near you. This is especially funny since you find a lot of familiar faces there and more often than I’d imagined they were not as old and not even as far away as I thought.
All in all I think the times are great to collaborate. I wish I had more time for this

I published a little open source tool that i wrote to help me messing with OpenCL source files: clcompile

Visit me on bitbucket at www.bitbucket.org/Extrawurst
Visit me on ohloh at www.ohloh.net/accounts/Extrawurst