Programming
Ordinary programmers write code to pay the bills. Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they’re delighted to find people will pay them for.
— Paul Graham, Great Hackers
That quote sums up my opinion of coding — my ideal way of relaxing is to curl up with a laptop and work on some code. It makes little difference to me whether or not it’s work-related.
For the past few years, I’ve also been interested in learning tricks that help me program more efficiently.
Current Projects
prayerletters.us. Most people probably don’t realize it, but in addition to being an interactive way for missionaries to manage their mailings and mailing lists, the web site also runs the software that Chistine and I use to print and mail the letters, which works out to be a much larger chunk of the code.
DBIx::SimpleQuery Perl Module. DBI creates a great abstraction for interacting with databases, but it can involve a lot of excess code when all you want to do is run simple queries, especially in one-off scripts. Enter DBIx::SimpleQuery, which hides all of that, and gives you a single function — query — to interact with databases.
Thunderbird. I’ve done a little QA with Mozilla in the past (pre-Firefox), but I’ve decided to get involved with the Thunderbird project since discovering at OSCON 2008 that it’s undergoing a rebirth after having been dormant for a few years. During that time, several thousand bugs have been submitted, so I’m helping by doing triage and making that list more manageable, learning more about the platform in the process.
Past Projects
NAVGAP, 1996-1999. This was my first large programming project, and my first experience doing something global.
PostgreSQL’s Slony. I helped primarily by cleaning up and improving the altperl utility scripts, along with some other testing. Being paid to work on it by my former employer was handy, but when I left that company, I ended up needing to work on other projects instead.
Drupal. This one comes and goes in phases, but I tend to serve as a PostgreSQL advocate (helping module owners who generally only use MySQL fix bugs that crop up when their modules get used on PostgreSQL servers), and help diagnose random bugs. I also maintain Scripture Filter module, and wrote and maintain the RememberFilter module.
You can also find my name in the mailings lists and bug databases of PostgreSQL and WebGUI, where I contributed in (very) small ways, usually via testing and mailing list or IRC support.
