Our whole engineering team uses Campfire to communicate. We have our git commits, our continuous integration testing (via CruiseControl), our deploy notices and our homegrown AI bot all in the room with us.

Whether one of our engineers is looking for a code review, some advice on a design decision or is logged in at 3am to deal with a server failure, Campfire provides a single point of contact that makes our team’s communication smooth, immediate and persistent. We can search back in the chat’s history, browse logs of conversations we missed and easily find files and images that our teammates have shared.

We’ve had a few people say something to the effect of, “isn’t this just a re-implementation of IRC?” To some extent, yes, it is a re-implementation of an instant chat mechanism. But Campfire’s strengths are in its universal accessibility (all you need is a web browser), its built-in transcript logging and searching, and its easy file and image sharing. This is one case where a commercial product found a niche in a market that was assumed to have already been satisfied.

If you’re using Campfire too, be sure to check out site-specific browsers like Fluid or Propane for Mac OS X, and Prism more generally. They can be a huge help, leaving your primary web browser for web browsing while you maintain a Campfire session on the side.

Published: January 13th, 2009