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Sharing to help myself

It's been a while since my last post but I have a good excuse. I've been in a new customer project (well new for me) for two months now and have absorbed a lot of new information on the technology stack and the project itself.

This time I'll be sharing a short post about sharing code and how it can help the one who's sharing the code. I'll be giving a real life example of how it happened to me.

My story


Back when I was implementing first version of my simple-todo REST-service I used Scala and Play framework for the service and specs2 for testing the implementation. Since then I've done a few other implementations of the service but I've continued to use specs2 as a testing framework.

I wrote about my implementation and shared the post through various services and as a result someone forked my work and gave me some pointers on how I could improve my tests. That someone was Eric Torreborre the man behind specs2 framework. I didn't take his refactoring as is but I did take some of them to good use. Later on I have looked at Eric's refactoring and our discussion a few times just so I don't forget that there's still good suggestions that I haven't taken in use.

So what's the big deal?


The point is that I shared my code, I shared my blog post and as a result someone decided to help me improve my code. He decided to share his expertise with me just because I gave him the opportunity by sharing my code and idea and he didn't want anything in return. That's got to be one of the best things you can get just by sharing something you've created.

So by sharing I got help before I even asked for it.
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