Hello, I am a 'nightly freak'. Pleased to meet you.

You may never have heard the phrase ‘nightly freak’ and there is probably a good reason for it i.e. it just came to me. As a typical Internet user, let’s see what Google has to say on it:

A nightly build […] takes place automatically, typically when no one is likely to be working in the office. The results of the build are inspected by the arriving programmers, who generally place a priority on ensuring the […] build does not break. Wikipedia page on Nightlies

While that may be a perfectly good definition, it still fails short to explain what I mean in details. Being a ‘nightly freak’ for me means running the very latest and greatest version of a program. The reason they are called ‘nightly builds’ /as suggested in the quote above/ usually has something to do with the fact they are produced at the end of the day, once everyone has left the office.

What are the benefits you may ask? Nightlies:

• Usually contain fixes and features not present in the official version,
• Are experiments in a way that they may offer a different approach to a task,
• Can have much better performance,
• Are a way for you, the User, to evaluate all of the above and submit feedback.

Take, for example, Firefox. While you may be running version 3.0.x, I have already adopted 3.1 in my daily browsing. It contains a lot of new features among which Geolocation, Private Browsing a.k.a. porn mode and a free video codec. Gmail, Facebook and other web applications perform in times faster than they do in 3.0.x.

Another great example is Thunderbird /if you have never heard of it before, think of what Firefox is to Internet Explorer and then apply the same concept to Outlook/. The nightly build contains so many new features it’s hardly possible to fit them on a single blog post.

There is, however, a side effect to all the great new stuff you are getting. Bugs. Yes, nightlies are unstable, they crash a lot, they may even refuse to run or damage your computer /although I have never experienced the last/. Developers need to know about these issues and this is where we, the Users, come in. As a ‘nightly freak’ I submit a lot of bug reports and sometimes even suggest a possible fix. Your partipation ensures those bugs do not make it to the final version and also has the side effect of making you feel a tad better about yourself.

My advise to you is: get involved. Get the latest Firefox or look for a nightly of your favourite program. Try it out, see if it crashes, inform the developers and enjoy a better product!

Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.