In what often feels like a grim era dominated by political rancor and recriminations, I'm getting an enormous kick out of the (mostly) politically-agnostic world of distributed software development.

A true little story from the past 24 hours showing what can be achieved when fferent parts of the planet just work together on a shared interest:

- Part 1: While trying out data visualisation tools for a work project, I noticed that a data vis tool (@getredash) didn't support @fedora (a type of Linux) but ran on Red Hat. In simple terms, I thought it might have been an oversight or at least a very quick fix. I was going to have a go at editing the file myself but opened an issue, in @github, in the meantime and went to bed (03:00 local time - I'm on a bad schedule). I live in Jerusalem, Israel.

- Part 2: Lucy, who lives in Seoul, South Korea, where it was morning, picked up on the request and also thought it seemed like a good idea. While I was finally asleep she rolled out a quick update.

- Part 3: Justin (I don't want to stalk but ... I think somewhere in the US) quickly validated the update approved it and merged it into the codebase.

By the time I woke up and checked my emails, @getredash (which is used by companies including @mozilla, @Atlassian, @waze and more) now had a community edition that installs wonderfully on Fedora.

I can't take too much credit for being the guy who spotted a gap and then went to sleep. And distributed work may not be brand spanking new. But equally there's something amazing about the whole thing.

(Thank you Lucky, Justin, and Redash!)

#Datavisualization #distributedsoftware #development