Yesterday was the first day of my endeavor. And it didn’t went exactly as I’ve planned or thought it would go. My plan was to head to GitHub pick a PHP project (because I know it the most) then pick some open ticket, do some coding, commit & do a pull request. Well the first and second part turned out to be a bigger problem than I thought. I just couldn’t find any suitable project to get my feet wet, and when I did there ware no simple tasks for me to tacke with. In the end this pull request is the only thing I have to show for. And it’s a bloody documentation addition, no code …

I’m probably approaching this the wrong way, I should probably try to get involved with projects I’m using (PHP, jQuery, Sphinx, …). But I don’t feel like I’ve got the skills to make any meaningful contribution there. Until next friday, when I’ll be diving in to the world of open source again, I’ll search for projects that would be suitable so when friday comes I’ll just start coding and hopefully crunch out some useful commits.

So this is the sort term plan; work on small PHP/JavaScript projects to familiarize myself with how all this things work from the management side of things and then, once I’m comfortable, move on to projects made in other technologies (Python, node.js, Ruby, …). That will give me a bigger pool of projects to choose from and I’ll finally start to learn something other than PHP again.

I’ll just copy/paste the description from the project’s github page:

I often build a “debug” sub-page on my projects that list various things about the state of the web page (memcache keys, memory usage, …). And it got boring to check the page every now and then by hand to see if everything is OK. So I’ve built this class that does the work for me (I just put it into a cron job). One of my usage examples is: I output some contents of a memcache key on my debug script, if one string is not present something is wrong, and this is where this class comes in.

You can grab the code here.

And a simple example so you can better imagine what this class does:

Include ( 'SimplePageCheck.php' );

// initialize a new SimplePageCheck object
$spc = new SimplePageCheck ();

// tell SimplePageCheck to send errors to your@email.com and to send one email with all errors
$spc->ReportToEmail ( 'your@email.com', false );

// tell SimplePageCheck to output errors to the standard output
$spc->ReportToOutput ( true );

// add some checks
$spc->AddCheck ( 'http://www.example.com', null, 'page by typing' );
$spc->AddCheck ( 'http://www.example.org', null, 'Section 3test.' ); // this will fail
// this too will fail
$spc->AddCheck ( 'http://www.example.org', 'http://www.example.org', '/You (.*) ttt/is', true );

// run all the added checks
$spc->RunChecks ();

I, at the time, wasn’t working on anything (though I had some ideas lurking around), but then I decided it’s time to make something and try myself in a different field for a change (software as a service in this case). I’ve decided I’ll build a bug tracker that small teams would actually want to be using. A bug tracker that is not cluttered with features you just don’t need.

So far I’m very early in the development process and all the details haven’t been ironed out just yet, but I will do my best to meet the (arbitrary) goal of launching by the end of November.

I have made a landing page, where you can drop your email and I’ll email you when SimpleBugz.com launches.

I suspect that this is a bug in Chrome as there is no mention of question mark having any special meaning in relation to CSS files (or anything else for that matter) in documentation.
I have filled a bug report that is currently marked as “unconfirmed”, but I suspect that nobody has looked at it yet. I wrote this so that if somebody has the same problem, he won’t waste his time on google and stackoverflow, as there is no solution out there (besides this one now:)

You can install the extension from the Google Chrome extensions page.

I’ve also decided to put the code on GitHub so feel free to fork and improve the extension. You’ll see that it’s really simple, only 39 lines of code including comments at this point. See the project here.

Please let me know if there are any bugs or if you have suggestions on how to improve the extension.

Off course I’m planning on adding more projects in the future (I think I have one or two laying around) and I hope that this will encourage me to start something new and release it to the wild.

I haven’t spent as merely enough time on it as I wanted, but I have a tendency to give up on a project if I don’t have a pretty design to work with. And since I have no artistic skills what so ever, the design isn’t much (hence the name) and I lost interest as soon as all functionality was complete. I hope I’ll at least get a book out of this, aiming for anything more would be unrealistic as some of the entries are simply amazing and I really can’t compete with that. Maybe if I had a better idea and somebody to do the design for me. Well, maybe next year.

On a related note: there is also the JS1k contest, in which you have to build a cool JavaScript demo using only 1K of code. Check it out.

And then there is me, co-managing many online communities thinking that all is well and fair. But there are still countless people complaining constantly about this and that.

So, either I’m a incompetent fool, or they are. The catch is that I simply don’t know.
When I’m in my “customers” shoes, everybody else is incompetent. And when I’m the boss of my “customers” it seems, to me, that they are the fools (dear customer, if you read this: I love you).

I see no way of resolving this right now. So, sadly, no advice here, just food for thought.

I was also recently reminded that I might have to re-learn some of the stuff I already know and hasn’t changed. I was reading a book called High performance MySQL (it was sitting on my shelf for almost a year now) and it shook the foundations of my knowledge that I base my code on. I learned that VARCHAR can be longer than 255 chars. Where did I pick that limitation up I don’t know (probably from CHAR, now that I have re-read the documentation), but I’ve been designing my schemas all this years with this limitation in mind and it never occurred to me that, in reality, I can define VARCHAR to be 65,535 chars long. I always used TEXT (or some variation) when it was required to store longer text.
This case by itself is no big deal, but I’m now trying to figure out what else I’ve also learned the wrong way in my early days as a programmer (I started to learn MySQL almost right from the start). The problem is that there’s simply no easy way to find out. I’d have to re-read every manual for every technology I use, and since I kinda need to sleep I think I won’t be doing that. What I will do, however, is open the manual every time I start using something that I take for granted so I will find out if there is anything rotten in my knowledge on that particular topic.