I’ve spent the last week working on implementing chef. The experience is frustrating to say the least. Instead of whining I wanted to take the time to write out some of my pain points and hopefully offer some constructive fixes to what I see as the wall in the learning curve. Now to be clear up front. Most of my problems aren’t with Chef, Ruby, or most of the core product; it’s with implementing it. To be more precise I think the failure REALLY is documentation. ...
Pelican 3.0 is almost out the door now. It’s been great working on a “real” project with other developers for what is, in retrospect, the first time ever. Some programmers I know would rather fork a project and trudge off into the snow with the code base, then fork off their own leg and write their way back before working on someone else’s code; I think at some point I caught that same fever from someone close to me. I think the phrase tossed around was; “The only thing that is worse than someone else’s code is working with someone else’s code.” The crazy part is, after actually working with other people on a project I wish I had done it earlier. ...
Things like this happen sometimes [4:27 PM] <SnowLprd> tBunnyMan: Nice work on #389. I can see how that will come in handy. :^) [4:27 PM] <tBunnyMan> Thanks! [4:28 PM] <tBunnyMan> I really just wanted a 404 and 50x error that matched my theme... but making it more extensible helps everyone [4:28 PM] <tBunnyMan> I just need to finish this test case for it when work stops being annoying [4:29 PM] <SnowLprd> Nice of you to generalize it for everyone, despite only needing it yourself for 404/50x errors. [4:29 PM] <SnowLprd> And the test will also be most welcome! \o/ [4:32 PM] <tBunnyMan> Pelican is fairly awesome IMO, I hope I can help tweak it into epic levels. [4:34 PM] <SnowLprd> With contributions like yours, those levels will be here in short order. :D [4:34 PM] <tBunnyMan> haha. I'm not that good ;p Thanks for the kind words [4:35 PM] <tBunnyMan> Catch you around. It's time to travel [4:35 PM] <SnowLprd> Every little bit counts! [4:35 PM] <SnowLprd> Sounds good. Cheers! [4:36 PM] <tBunnyMan> It does. It's why I love contributing little things to big projects. All I really was trying to do is add a very quick and simple feature I needed. This was the response I got for it! The thing is, you would be shocked how infrequently I see something like this… It’s this type of additude and behavior amongst developers that makes people WANT to work with eachother and help really grow a product. ...
Backstory When I bought my NOOK Simple Touch™ in January of this year I rediscovered calibre E-book management. While software always felt clunky in Mac OS X you could never deny it’s power and sheer amazing once you got past the UI. Being a big fan of ReadItLater I immediately tried to have the program pump my massive reading list into my Nook. To my dismay I discovered that the plugin was hardly complete. It piped my entire ~500 article1 reading list into a several megabytes large ebook and ordered articles from newest to oldest. Running the plugin a second time… produced the same results. It hadn’t even the courtesy to mark articles as read. ...