Older blog entries for srl (starting at number 87)

Net::ICal prerelease time

srl@trinity% cvs update; perl Makefile.PL; make; make test
Dammit, another bug. *hackhackhack*

Wash, rinse, repeat, commit. Collaborators and testers welcome.

I notice that the reefknot-devel lists are growing in size. This is a good thing.

Reefknot

Spent tonight doing code review on other people's work, some of which I've needed to do for weeks (my apologies to LotR). We got some big contributions from a guy named Scott Hutton, whose company Workspot seems to be using our code and giving back to it as well.

With any luck, 0.14 will be out Real Soon Now. With even more luck, I'll get some demos built for that talk Skud and I are doing in a few weeks.

the day job

When explaining to my mom what I've been doing at work, I said, "It's like a bunch of elves built a factory from sketches on the back of napkins, left the factory running, and disappeared. I'm reconstructing the blueprints so we can fix things when they break, and figuring out which parts of the factory need to be nuked from orbit and rebuilt." I'm being somewhat successful. Today I fixed a problem based on the work I've been doing at documentation. DocBook makes me happy.

Anyone have suggestions for a good ticket-tracking/helpdesk system? If it's built in Perl, that's ideal.

Yay! Skud and I are confirmed to speak on Reefknot at the May 1 technical meeting of Boston.pm. If you're within commuting distance of Boston and want to learn more about what we're doing with shared calendaring, you can come play with us. RSVP, please, so there'll be enough pizza. Or mail me if you're curious about the project and can't make the meeting.

Last night, I did taxes, hacked a little, looked at LotR's recent code contributions, stayed up too late. Oh, and I got my CPAN id; I'm now SRL on CPAN. I'm waiting for the REEFKNOT group id we applied for to come through so I can do a real CPAN release of Net::ICal.

My bike-to-work efforts are beginning to pay off; today's the second day this week I've biked all the way in. It's beginning to be Spring in New England. Life is good.

Well, I mostly haven't hacked in the last 5 days or so. I've been busy working on my bike and riding it, just sort of chilling out. I haven't felt motivated to work on open source, so rather than forcing myself and burning out, I'm just waiting until the mood strikes again.

I found out that I'm not going to be relocating out of the Boston area for some time now. There was a potential family move, but it's not happening. This is good.

The new job is fabulous. I've been bringing DocBook (yes, documentation is important) to an otherwise cruft-filled and underdocumented organization. Mmm, software archaeology. Having a job I like seems to reduce my motivation for free software in my spare time though.

So. I took a day off yesterday from coding, mostly. This was good for me. I'm getting my bike tuned up for the summer. I rode it from my house to Central Square (about halfway to work), then took the T the rest of the way. By the end of the summer, I want to be biking roundtrip (16ish miles), but I'm not that conditioned yet. Oh, and there's tae kwon do to be wedged in there somewhere.

I bought slick tires; now to ponder panniers and my overall body fatigue. Going from 0 to 8ish miles/day is hard. Maybe a cycle computer would enthuse me. But spring is on the way, and this is Good. Happy bodies make happy minds.

Spent better parts of yesterday catching up on Reefknot list mail. Looked at a few patches that I hadn't had time to look at yet. A newish developer contributed the seeds of Net::iTIP and Net::iMIP, so I reviewed those. I'm trying not to end up a day-to-day project leader, because I don't feel I have enough experience to do that well. On the other hand, I've always been the sort who fills leadership vacuums.

It seems that Net::ICal 0.13 had some packaging bugs, due to my failing to test it against perl 5.005. Silly me. LotR pointed me at the article on software release steps, and mtearle contributed an INSTALL file and other niceties. I'm eating crow, learning the error of my ways, and preparing for the release of 0.14 in a week or two.

Woot! Net::ICal 0.13 is out. I've been designated release manager, since Skud is temporarily out of commission. So I've been learning spiffy things about what to do (and not do) when releasing software. For those of you who are curious about where Reefknot is going, see the developer roadmap that I wrote up a few days ago, now in HTML format.

28 Mar 2001 (updated 28 Mar 2001 at 02:08 UTC) »

More work on Reefknot. I spent most of the weekend hacking and got several new features rolled into Net::ICal. This makes me happy. We're getting closer to RFC-compliance, though there's still lots of work to do. I want auto-generated RFC-compliance tests. The ABNF grammars in RFC 2445 would *seem* to be easy to parse, but I'm not convinced that parsing them would yield instant tests of the sort I want. Anyone got good ideas for how to generate massive amounts of RFC-valid data to throw at our code?

We've got several enthusiastic new developers and users who are avidly producing bug reports and feature requests. It's a challenge to keep up, but this is a Good Thing. I'm glad people are interested in shared calendaring tools.

Wrote up a developers' roadmap (see the DocBook source); I don't have an HTML version online at the moment though. If you're curious about what we're doing now and what we're planning to do, look at that link. I'll post a link to an HTML version once I have it.

Certification weirdness: I got my first Journeyer cert (thanks jdub!) but I seem to have been downgraded to Observer. How odd.

Gah. I've been so busy this week, and I can't really figure out what I was doing. I started my new job, which seems pretty good so far. I've seen a few things that concern me, but none of it seems major (yet?). It's mostly slow, introductory, get-used-to-the-new-job stuff at this point. I'm starting to get a sense of the internal politics.

Due to first-week-of-work stuff, I've mostly just been keeping my head above water on Reefknot. List volume has gone up this week with the addition of a few new, enthusiastic developers. This is good, but hard to keep up with. I'm back to the old problem I have when working a salaried job: how to balance it with my hacking and with the other things I want to do. Or, rather, how to do as much hacking as I want to and not end up sleep-deprived and zombie-like by the end of the workweek. Thoughts, anyone?

I've been reading Advanced Perl Programming this week on the way back and forth from work. It's good stuff, but slow going. I've also been playing with Plucker, which is making it easier for me to keep up with people's online journals and such.

Whee, I got a new job. I start Monday.

In other news, Reefknot is coming along nicely. Look for a release of Net::ICal Real Soon Now. I've been busy, and so have LotR and others.

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