Work report and a lovely story.

Most of my work in past 2 weeks is fix the existing issue and improve code quality.

I have 2 major tasks that needed to be done first which are Bootstrap upgrading and Open ID login.

The Bootstrap almost completely done waiting for code review but for the Open ID the I've got test failure that I can't solve it until now. It is a bit weird that first time when I implemented it I made the test function and proved it and it worked properly but it failed after I pushed to Github. That sounds crazy but it's real. I still keep fixing it with my mentor help.

I don't have any thing much too talk about my work since it's quite similar with last topic update and I still fix my code again and again.

I have a lovely story that I want to share. There was a girl came to ask me about how to contribute Open Source ( I think maybe she is reading this post). I was figuring out a while – this is an open question that has so many answers for me. For me I think the best way to get start is finding what we like to do. I think if we have a passion or inspiration on it that would be easy to get through it. I told her to find the Open Source project and trying to find the contributor or maintainer of the project. I'm sure that those people in the Open Source always be nice with a newbie as I have experienced and they could help her to get start. Of course I can help her to get start with Perl or MetaCPAN but since she is absolutely new I think she could choose which technology she likes to learn.

She wants to contribute to Open Source because she wants to make some small contribution before she can apply for the OPW program next round. Although, I think it's a bit too early to contract a mentor before the time of the application submission and we don't know yet which organizations are going to participate in next round and who volunteer to be mentors. However, be ready and well prepare is always more impressive. So just told her to prepare for the technology that organization is using and self study.

Overall, I want to share this story because I'm so impressed with her motivation and education in her environment. She is younger than me and she is still a student. I believe she will get 'multi-view' of study from the OPW which I didn't experience in my school life I would say. I think every program in the Open Source community – Google Summer of Code or The Outreach Program for Women are really cool program that I wish I have known that since I was in the university. It didn't happen anyway but I wish I could share this such a great program to Thai students to learn more and get involved in the Open Source community as I have been. I'm so happy that I have a chance to give that girl some advice and I hope in could do more. So if someone reading my blog please feel free to contract me to help even I'm also a newbie too! :)

Obstacle in half way of OPW.

Now, I have been working on week 8 of The Outreach Program for Women program with proposal to work on the index issue of MetaCPAN search. But my timeline a bit messed up now since the time block has been split into Bootstrap upgrading and fixing the broken as an effect from new Bootstrap.

I’m supposed to work on the new things but I cannot since I have to complete the current pull requests with fixing and cleaning a mess I made. 

For me, I think this is some kind of classic problems in software development life cycle — it’s hard to make the code perfect in the first solution especially when you lack of experience. Even that’s the best solution in that moment but may not last long. It still need be maintained, fixed and improved like an endless development. 

  

For me the difficult thing to be a programmer is when you have to ‘estimate' when the job will be done but the more difficult thing seems to be make it 'completely done' in the time you have estimated. We will never know whether the job is difficult or not until we work on that which I think it’s a challenge of programmer job that people like. 

However, we did estimate and we are overdue sounds better than no estimation and no goal. Then we could learn about our performance and speed in each job.

Bootstrap 3 migration and some funny ideas.

I have spending a week to upgrade Bootstrap from version 2 to 3, although it wasn’t in my original proposal but it is my new purpose to work on that because I think we could move to future and it is time consumed task resulted in no one has time to do it but now I’m working on it for full time. I could donate my time to do that. I really appreciate my mentors for a respect for my opinion and let me keep on doing that.

I got to learn a lot about Bootstrap’s stuffs even though I got  frustrated about it but I also enjoy doing to. I think the more frustration I got the more knowledge I have learn.

This issue urge me get PAUSE id since I need to have the ID to get MetaCPAN activated and finally I have it! I’m not sure whether it’s funny or not that I have coding Perl for about 2 years but I don’t have PAUSE account. My intention was if I have had inspiration to make some new module I would register for the PAUSE account. For me I think it’s funny to have it while I’m not really CPAN author.

In my programmer life I think I have an objective when I write the code that it should be ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ which are enough for productive work. However, one more thing I have learn recently from Open Source work and I should apply to my code is it should be ‘easy to read and understand’ as well. I realized that I never experienced this issue seriously before since I worked with the same colleagues in the same team for long while so we could understand each other coding style. But this is Open Source, programmer are from around the world even we’re coding the same language but it can result in many ways to do it. I think maybe that’s why TIMTOWTDI is extended to …  there’s more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either (TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE) which I think I quite agree with that ;)