You’re probably spending a lot of time alone in front of the screen as you embark on your new journey to become a developer. Though it’s nice to have some alone time at the start of a new job, is that always how developers work?
No, it does not. While developers often work independently at their workstations, it is also common for development teams to collaborate through collaborative coding.
In a nutshell, collaborative coding is a method of software development in which pairs or teams of programmers collaborate on a project by coding or editing each other’s code.
We’ll go over the different types of collaborative coding setups- why developers use collaborative coding and some popular collaborative coding tools and environments in this article. Here’s how it goes!
Tools for Collaborative Coding
In recent years, live collective collaboration become far more feasible. Although you should still have one person sign off on the final code, being able to see other people’s edits as they happen is a huge benefit for distance learning, crunch-time work, and peer review.
Here are a few tools and services you can work on for real-time collaborative coding
Codeanywhere
Codeanywhere is primarily marketed as a code-on-the-go environment—an in-browser, on-tablet, on-phone editor that supports 75 languages and many of them have in-cloud execution environments. However, Codeanywhere includes a number of real-time code sharing and collaboration features. You can simply send a link to others to share a project, or you can set up a real-time collaboration to allow others to edit your files in your editor. You can also grant SSH access to other users of your project.
Floobits
Floobits provides collaborative, real-time editing and chats through its own in-browser editor as well as add-ons for a variety of editors such as Sublime Text, Atom, Neovim, Emacs and IntelliJ IDEA, but not Visual Studio Code. The service allows multiple users to collaborate at the same time—that is, more than two at a time—and provides users with granular permissions (no access, read, write, administrate). You can create public and private workspaces, share terminals, and synchronize work directories without using an editor and video and text chat with your teammates using WebRTC and IRC.
Teletype for Atom
Teletype for Atom, a pioneer among real-time code collaboration tools, enables Atom users to share their workspace with team members. While Live Share users can freely move around a project, Teletype is more host-centric. When the host launches a “portal,” their active tab transforms into a shared workspace, and collaborators follow the host as they navigate between files. Teletype, with its driver and navigator model, is well-suited to the pair programming use case, but it is not as robust for all purposes as Live Share’s open-ended collaborative development environment.
AWS Cloud 9
Cloud9, powered by AWS, is a collaborative coding tool that allows developers and programmers to run, write, or debug code in pairs or as a team with a few clicks. In terms of its general-purpose cloud-based terminal, anyone with a passion for programming languages such as C#, Go, Python, Java, Node.js, or Ruby can
- Create serverless applications that can be released quickly and at a lower cost.
- AWS Cloud9 also comes with a slew of other advantages, such as code completion, hinting (which allows WordPress or Cloud developers to identify errors in their project code in real-time), reduced debugging time and a slew of others.
As a result, even if you are new to pair or collaborative programming, knowing about the benefits of this amazing cloud-based tool will help you track the progress of any projects assigned to your team of developers.
Advantages of Collaborative Coding
When faced with a large development project, many teams may believe that dividing and conquering is the best approach. After all, doesn’t it make more sense to have everyone work on different aspects of the project and then put it all together? No, not always. While collaborative coding may appear to slow things down, it has a number of advantages that make it a worthwhile approach.
Increased debugging
It is much easier and faster to catch errors when everyone is looking at the same code at the same time. Whether it’s a misplaced comma or a misspelled variable, catching errors early saves the entire team time and frustration later on when there’s a lot more code to sift through.
Great communication
Poor communication can lead to failure when everyone works on their own code for a development project. Collaborative coding, on the other hand, necessitates excellent communication. Everyone hears what everyone else is saying during a collaborative programming project. And, because anyone’s ideas must be coded by someone else, everyone must clearly explain their approach to the project. Collaborative coding also requires the team to openly communicate their disagreements and resolve them before the project can move forward. As a result, everyone on the team understands and supports the final product.
Easy to pick up projects
People call in sick. People take vacations or are reassigned to new projects. Collaborative coding ensures that everyone on the team has a complete understanding of the development project. If someone is unable to work on the project unexpectedly, the rest of the team will know exactly where to begin again and how the project is progressing.
Conclusion
If you only remember one thing from this article, let it be that team players outnumber individual contributors. In a field where there appears to be a hot new framework to master every other week, our technical skills age differently than our soft skills. As a result, developers who can collaborate well with others will always be in high demand. Collaborative coding isn’t just a great way to learn; it’s also a highly sought-after skill set that anyone can master with enough practice and patience.
