Wednesday, July 19, 2006

End of 2nd month assessment

Shortly after my first end of month assessment I submitted my first patch to BugZilla. On reflection is was a disaster and the code was nowhere near it needed to be. At that time I was naive enough to think my patch would see r+ approval by the end of that week. I am still working on this patch and iterating it. I am currently on my 4th formal submission and things are getting closer to being feature complete. There are still some huge problems with the design of the code but I am working with the close reviews of Stuart Morgan, Nick Kreeger, and Bruce Davidso to improve things.

I posted a video to show the people of the world exactly what Camino was getting for it's money. It sparked quite a lot of discussion between people on IRC and people in the Comments. A lot of this discussion was negative and certainly detrimental to the progress that I have been trying to make. I had to block out most of the 'community' for a couple of weeks because I was hearing was that what I was doing was a massive mistake and that people did not want it. I guess these problems were me own doing since I had been very keen to hear what people thought about things, I just struggled to deal with all the negativity.

(This feels like something I would post to LiveJournal, if I had an account)

Pink and I agreed that it was time to get some work done on the 2nd milestone - dragging tabs to re-arrange them in the tab bar. Progress on dragging tabs has been terrible in comparison to progress on the scrolling-tab bar. I tried working on scrolling tabs in the morning and dragging tabs in the afternoon which was a complete disaster.

I also probably made a mountain out of a molehill with respect to receiving my pay cheques from Google. I received my first cheque the other day. The cheque was dated 20th June 2006 and the date it was sent (dated on the parcel) was 12th July. It arrived on 17th July. I don't know what the cheque did between 20th June and the 12th July, I just hope it doesn't take that long for the 2nd cheque to arrive. I don't really feel it is a good idea for me to talk negatively about the hand that feeds so I'll cut short this part of the assessment.

I finally have a Safari Bookshelf Account. We are able to take out 10 books at a time, sadly nearly all of the books that I have any interest in taking out are books that I have already had to buy to learn Objective-C and Cocoa. I'm sure that with nearly 4,000 books to choose from there will be other things that interest me. It is actually quite nice of O'Reilly to give us this for free, so a big thanks to Chris DiBona at Google who seems to have spent quite a while negotiating it for us.

I showed off a new work in progress demonstration much to the delight of Pink. It felt good to get some more code out of the door and into the BugZilla torture chamber. I only need to add 3 more features to make tab-scrolling feature complete but they are by far the most difficult things to do.

I am very concerned about the progress that I have been making on draggable tabs. I need to stop working on scrolling tabs during the day and really focus my efforts of draggable tabs. I only have one more month to reach the targets of this project and I honestly cannot see it happening at the moment. Considering how long it has taken me to get my scrolling tabs patch through BugZilla to a stage where people think it might be a couple more iterations away from R+ which is fantastic to hear, but also leaves me really concerned that draggable tabs will not land on time and I will fail to reach the goals of my project.

I need to pull myself together and start working harder. There would be nothing worse than to have come this far and not acheive what I set out to do.

(I will probably re-read this later on today and re-word some things or cut complete sections / add new sections)

4 comments:

Desmond Elliott said...

Thanks hudson, that really made my day! I haven't heard that yet and it is pretty funny.

Anonymous said...

Don't be so hard on yourself!

Looking forward to seeing your work on draggable tabs. I, personally, love the scrollable tab bar.

Keep up the good work!

Jamie (from Scotsys)

Anonymous said...

In fairness to you, you jumped right into code that had been un-owned and un-maintained almost since it landed in fall 2004—almost 2 years now!—and where there are still a few *regressions from the landing* lurking. On top of that, M1 happened to be a bug where, much to our failing, the Camino team hadn't really ever come to a solid consensus on the specific problems to be solved or the way to solve them :-(

I'm certainly sorry for all the dark times right after the first demo...it is really, truly amazing to be able to play with a Camino where tabs move, and I hope you know that we all are in awe of that and profoundly appreciative of your work to bring it about :)

Anonymous said...

+1 profoundly appreciative dude in the audience here.