Coding is like gardening...

Introducing Jabbersonic

I’ve been working on improving our build process recently and have been inspired by several articles on Extreme Feedback devices.

Specifically, this blog post at Pragmatic Automation caught my attention: I really liked the idea of being able to listen to complex systems such as a project management flow. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could control a varied soundscape with, say, Jabber messages?

So after four hours of hacking late last night, Jabbersonic was born.

It’s pretty easy to get started. If you’re on a mac with iLife installed it should work out of the box:

sudo gem install gosu xmpp4r-simple
git clone git://github.com/ChrisMDP/jabbersonic.git
cd jabbersonic
bin/server  

This will kick off a gosu app which will listen for Jabber messages sent to the provided account and play different sounds corresponding to different events. An example of usage:

It’s currently set up for a continuous integration system – it should be trivial to make the Hudson Jabber plugin talk to it, and write a tiny API app for Hoptoad for example. It’s not confined to project management though: there’s a simple configuration file which allows you to make it work for pretty much any complex system you might want to model.

For more information, see the README. Opinion is divided here as to whether a soundscape is actually useful for project management or just an irritation: I guess it will mostly depend on the sound design, but we’ve yet to try it out properly.

Let me know if you try it out, or use it for anything useful.

Posted on: Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 10:12 am In category: agile, code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.