Aug 25, 2009
So this year's Google Summer of Code is officially over. Today 19:00 UTC was deadline for sending in evaluations for both mentors and students. Therefore I think some kind of summary what was happening and what I was doing is in order.
I was working on implementing neat idea that would allow previously impossible things for Gentoo users. Original name for the idea was "Tree-wide collision checking and provided files database". You can find it on Gentoo wiki still. I later named the project collagen (as in collision generator). Of course implemented system is quite a bit different from original wiki idea. Some things were added, some were removed. If you want to relive how I worked on my project, you can read my weekly reports at gentoo-soc mailing list (I will not repeat them here). Some information was aggregated also on soc.gentooexperimental.org. As final "pencils down" date approached I created final bugreports of features not present in delivered release (and bugs there were present for that matter). Neither missing features, nor present bugs are a real show-stopper, they mostly affect performance. And more importantly I plan to continue my work on this project and perhaps other Gentoo projects. I guess some research what those projects are is in order :-)
Before GSoC I kind of had an idea how open-source projects work since I've participated with some to a degree. However I underestimated a lot of things, and now I would do them differently. But that's a good thing. I kind of like the idea that no project is a failed one as long as you learn something from it. It reminds me of recent Jeff Atwood's post about Microsoft Bob and other disasters of software engineering. To quote him:
I was working on implementing neat idea that would allow previously impossible things for Gentoo users. Original name for the idea was "Tree-wide collision checking and provided files database". You can find it on Gentoo wiki still. I later named the project collagen (as in collision generator). Of course implemented system is quite a bit different from original wiki idea. Some things were added, some were removed. If you want to relive how I worked on my project, you can read my weekly reports at gentoo-soc mailing list (I will not repeat them here). Some information was aggregated also on soc.gentooexperimental.org. As final "pencils down" date approached I created final bugreports of features not present in delivered release (and bugs there were present for that matter). Neither missing features, nor present bugs are a real show-stopper, they mostly affect performance. And more importantly I plan to continue my work on this project and perhaps other Gentoo projects. I guess some research what those projects are is in order :-)
Before GSoC I kind of had an idea how open-source projects work since I've participated with some to a degree. However I underestimated a lot of things, and now I would do them differently. But that's a good thing. I kind of like the idea that no project is a failed one as long as you learn something from it. It reminds me of recent Jeff Atwood's post about Microsoft Bob and other disasters of software engineering. To quote him:
The only truly failed project is the one where you didn't learn anything along the way.I believe I have learned a lot. I believe that if I started collagen now, it would be much better in the end. And the best thing is that I can still do that. I get to continue my project and learn some more. If I learned anything during my work on collagen it's this:
If you develop something in language without strong type checking CREATE THE DAMN UNIT TESTS! It will make you life later on much easier.
In next episode: Why I think Gmail is corrupting minds of people and why I hate mobile phones
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