The Bittersweet Taste Of Bleeding Edge Software

The following guest post was written by Brad Williams of WebDevStudios.com

I’ve been developing with WordPress for a few years now and the projects I’ve been working on have started to expand into bleeding edge software. Bleeding edge software is defined as “technology that is so new (and thus, presumably, not perfected) that the user is required to risk reductions in stability and productivity in order to use it” ref. WordPress MU, BuddyPress, and bbPress are my three current tasks intertwined to work flawlessly together. Of course that doesn’t happen now does it? Is this the price we pay for pushing the bounds of WordPress development?

The Bitter: I’m creating a new BuddyPress focused website which requires an alpha install of bbPress on top of WordPress MU 2.7 beta. Installing beta software and alpha software on top of beta software makes my head spin just thinking about it. As you can imagine there are many bugs that still exist in all three packages, so why use them? The draw of utilizing bleeding edge functionality is too great to bypass for me.

The Sweet: Being at the “bleeding edge” of WordPress functionality is actually an interesting place to be. Many bugs I stumble across are active tickets in development Trac, which allows me to fix the issue for myself and also for the community. Helping out in the development of BuddyPress (or any open source project) is really thrilling, especially when you see the buzz surrounding it and how your code changes are helping.

Bleeding edge software development isn’t for everybody, but if you want to help these amazing open source projects grow it’s great to help out in anyway you can. If nobody used the software packages these projects would die, and thus the need for bleeding edge software developers exists and I’m happy to fill that role. Code on!