The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. — Peter Drucker
Yammer is a web app that lets you “connect and share with the people in your company or organization”. It’s basically Twitter for your intranet.
We use it to fire off quick messages about the progress we’ve made and the challenges we’re facing on our projects. Using the Yammer API we’ve been able to tie Git into the system so that notifications are sent out after each commit which contain the commiter, the commit message, and a hash tag associating the Yammer message with the git repository name.
The idea of broadcasting status information like this is similar in concept to Alistair Cockburn’s idea of Information Radiators. From his page describing the concept:
[...] “information radiator” refers to a publicly posted display that shows people walking by what is going on. Information radiators are best when they are big, very easy to see (e.g. not online, generally), and change often enough to be worth revisiting
My favorite example has always been using lava lamps to indicate build status.
Anyway, the code has been made available on my github at http://github.com/rboyd/git2yammer/tree/master. Using git with yammer has been great for us so far and I hope you find it useful in your projects as well.
Tags: api, communication, development, engineering, git, integration, software, yammer