Though one thing about “sharing everything with someone you trust”: you could have a time-out on this which you set in advance. Nothing is permanent, and this would be a good way of cleaning up the cruft of what should often be temporary access for specific things.

In the longer term, if you are recording access times, you might spot patterns that I tend to give access to an acquaintance to get some data in relation to something we were talking about down the pub, and after they have got it during the next week they never visit again — although they are now marked for permanent access, which I have to consciously decrement later, with the concern that I might cause offense if the status is conflated with friending. So I should just give them access for a week, which times out.

Maybe even the access is for a certain amount of clicks or files, so it’s like: “Sure, I got a copy of that, here’s the key to my office, it’s on top of the filing cabinet.” I can get on with having my coffee, so I don’t need to lead him there up the elevator and down the hallway and physically show it to him, which takes up my precious time. Though I might not be impressed if I get back and I find he’s been rifling through all the desk drawers, the coat pockets, the cabinets, and so forth.

What we have here is total access for polite people. And politeness does follow a particular pattern that a computer can recognize. Things don’t get moved around that shouldn’t. Maybe a note left on my desk when I get back about something he happened to spot.

We do commit messages on code check-ins. Maybe if they change something or move stuff around, they are forced to write me a little note. Can we have little notes prior to reading? You start surfing around through a set of documents that aren’t yours. After ten seconds of reading one, the modal dialog pops up with the question: “Hey, what are you doing here?” Fill in the answer that gets parsed for legibility, it gets saved for later and you can carry on looking.

Regards,
Irvan Putra.

Cheers,
Matt