Tape 003 - Clip 1
Short_Description:
Tara on engineering orginization
TranscriptText:
Theres actually little bit of history there When started back in 95 the
engineering organization was around 20 engineers roughly and
as weve expanded that
issue it becomes much more predominant because when started everyone knew
everything because
it was small code base and small group Now were talking about
100 engineers and issues get more complicated And during the development of
the 4.0
product we invested job called the build God and was the
first build God and my job
was to figure out enough about all three platforms to coordinate that effort and its not so
much that know every intimate aspect of every development and specific detail for
particular platform for every whatever but that could had enough knowledge
that
could coordinate and it was coordinating position and right now for the current process
the build God is Chris And its hard job uh and its theres no good training for it and
the
only way that weve found that really works the engineers do really have time
the
development application engineers dont really have time to worry about
all three platforms
all the time it slows them down way too much its trade-off right and so weve set up
system like tinder box system that checks your code automatically and
the build Gods
uh of which there are no three and half of us theres couple in training urn are
system like tinder box system that checks your code automatically and
the build uh of which there are no three and half of us theres couple in training urn are
basically the repositories of knowledge for the generic type of cross-platform issues and
what were trying to do working with Alan Spragens for the documentation to get this on
the Net is to
put that knowledge down in some sort of HTML format or whatever but
weve found its lot harder to do that because lot of the stuff that we do
is kind of
instinctual at this point and its hard to really computize it down But yeah that was the
reaction 90% of the weird things that we do as development process at Netscape has
evolved because of the very distinctive environment Other companies that Ive worked at
they were platform specific Windows only from my background um you just didnt
have these kind of issues and what was good standard building procedure at those
companies just fails here but
it makes it more
interesting laughs
engineering organization was around 20 engineers roughly and
as weve expanded that
issue it becomes much more predominant because when started everyone knew
everything because
it was small code base and small group Now were talking about
100 engineers and issues get more complicated And during the development of
the 4.0
product we invested job called the build God and was the
first build God and my job
was to figure out enough about all three platforms to coordinate that effort and its not so
much that know every intimate aspect of every development and specific detail for
particular platform for every whatever but that could had enough knowledge
that
could coordinate and it was coordinating position and right now for the current process
the build God is Chris And its hard job uh and its theres no good training for it and
the
only way that weve found that really works the engineers do really have time
the
development application engineers dont really have time to worry about
all three platforms
all the time it slows them down way too much its trade-off right and so weve set up
system like tinder box system that checks your code automatically and
the build Gods
uh of which there are no three and half of us theres couple in training urn are
system like tinder box system that checks your code automatically and
the build uh of which there are no three and half of us theres couple in training urn are
basically the repositories of knowledge for the generic type of cross-platform issues and
what were trying to do working with Alan Spragens for the documentation to get this on
the Net is to
put that knowledge down in some sort of HTML format or whatever but
weve found its lot harder to do that because lot of the stuff that we do
is kind of
instinctual at this point and its hard to really computize it down But yeah that was the
reaction 90% of the weird things that we do as development process at Netscape has
evolved because of the very distinctive environment Other companies that Ive worked at
they were platform specific Windows only from my background um you just didnt
have these kind of issues and what was good standard building procedure at those
companies just fails here but
it makes it more
interesting laughs
