His wife was a professor at the Northeastern computer science department when I went there. A wonderful teacher.

I hadn't realized Zed was built from the ground up to support collaborative programming. I liked it already, and I like it even more now.

The problem with no collaboration is that it can lead to fragility. Context transfer is costly, but without it work bottlenecks around key individuals. When those individuals are explicitly disincentivized to transfer knowledge preemptively, you lose the slack in the system. Vacations and exits become more fraught. Deadlines are harder to hit reliably. You have less systemic resiliency.

Instead, encourage targeted collaboration (in particular, pairing: collaboration with a goal of accomplishing something) within the scope of a team, and avoid cross-team collaboration, which is the expensive part.

This was before Git! (Subversion had its meager charms.) Even after Git became widespread, some infra teams were uncomfortable installing a dev tool like Git on production systems, so a git pull was out of the question.

The main issue that, while not unique to Rails, plagued the early interpreted-language webapps I worked on was that the tail end of early CI pipelines didn't spit out a unified binary, just a bag of blessed files. Generating a tarball helped, but you still needed to pair it with some sort of an unpack-and-deploy mechanism in environments that wouldn't or couldn't work with stock cap deploy, like the enterprise. (I maintained CC.rb for several years.) Docker was a big step up IMV because all of the sudden the output could be a relatively standardized binary artifact.

This is fun. We should grab a beer and swap war stories.