Scatterbrained development

Quite a few days have passed since any of the development team of Entertainer has committed changes to the trunk. I understand that everyone gets busy at times so there could be any number of reasons why things seem a little slow with Entertainer, but I thought I’d explain what I’ve been up to (aside from normal life events that pull me away from my computer).

I think I’ve been spinning my wheels, and I’ve been spinning my wheels because I’m trying too many different things. I’m pretty new to the open source development world, and there are tons of things to learn. I find myself exploring python, clutter, GTK+, glade, blogging, django, unit testing, etc. All of these things are great in their own right, but it’s distracting and I’m not getting my hands dirty with coding as much as I could or should. I just finished listening to MacBreak Weekly on TWIT, and Patrick Wilson, the drummer for Weezer, made an interesting comment about being “a mile wide, and one inch deep.” Eventually, I’d love to have a deep understanding of everything and be a mile wide and a mile deep, but for now, I think I’m going to scale back my exploration and focus on getting deeper with stuff.

I intend to shift my focus from trying to understand all of Entertainer now, to understanding the core by fleshing the testing framework with more unit testing code. I’ll finish up my issues that I accepted from our google code change tracker, and get to work on expanding test coverage.

In the future, when I’m more comfortable with my python skills and how the Entertainer source code functions, I may jump back into some other topics of interest (like clutter and how we intend to package our software). So, my advice to budding open source developers? Get out there and get a full feel for the field, but don’t get sucked into long winded tangents.

>>> print “Hello World!”

This is my first blog post, and since it’s my first post, I’d like to explain the purpose of my blog. My great adventure into the blogosphere will probably have a distinctive slant toward all things Python. I intend to journal my experience with my involvement on the Entertainer Media Center project. Entertainer is written in Python, a dynamically typed language that I’ve spent some time with over the last couple of months.

As someone who uses Perl for development in his day job, my brief impression of Python is amazement at its elegance and readability. Python has already showed me how easy stuff like unit testing and Test Driven Development can be. But that’s a subject for another post. I don’t want to drone on already, so I’ll stop here.

Thanks for reading.