The measure of code quality is WTFs/minute.

I just realized, after a rather intriguing facebook conversation with Shiva, that the only true measure of learning is Epiphanies per Session.

My latest Epiphany was a couple of days back. And the one before that was a month or so back, when I was ‘pairing’ with Sid. I think the one before that was quite some time back – when I understood the true meaning of closures. And a few “Yes, it is not just me” moments when talking with SriramK.

College is yet to give me a technical one. It has given me a lot of emotional ones though. Maybe someone could chuck the totally pointless part of what we call college (the supposedly technical part (where they give you xeroxes of shittily written programs that often don’t compile and give you a banana if you are able to copy it perfectly on to the screen (a task at which, many CS students fail))) and keep just the useful parts.

I was writing a post on how 2009 ended. Here is the tl;dr version: It was my ‘growing-up’ year in Tech, and ‘roller-coaster’ year in personal stuff. There! I’m certainly significantly wiser at the end of 2009, and that is due more to my state at the beginning of 2009 than at the end :) Good enough

So how did I celebrate? By joining the KPP competition at Kurukshetra. That’s what I did at around 12 on New Year’s. Not intentionally, mind you. Just happened.

Then, on 2nd Jan, I did something interesting. On a whim, I took my bicycle, and rode an hour in traffic. Alone. To Marina Beach.

And then I spent the next hour sitting near the waves. Looking around. Just enjoying myself. And then rode back home, and for the first time in over 4 years, slept before 12.

I did it again the next day. With a friend this time. My knees were already killing me since I practically had no physical activity before this. But I still did it again. My knees would literally kill me now if they had a way to.

I’m happy. Teen Angst has taken a break :)

Let this year be the one when I remove external dependencies on my happiness :)

We had a python workshop at college a week back.

One hellova workshop it was! Kausik conducted it, and about 14 people turned up (We picked 15, one girl had to miss it ‘coz of fever). Every single one of them was there because they wanted to be there. This happened during semester holidays, so they came to college just for this. And from the feedback (and the actions that followed it) I got, it was worth their while.

Teaching Python

Kausik did all the hard work, with me just going around helping people get unstuck. Watching people when they suddenly get it is a really amazing feeling.

The hardest part for many people was not the significant whitespace (most intuitively got it, we didn’t even have to repeat it once). It was the concept of explicit self. And the biggest (though not exhaustive) selling points were, in no particular order: Lack of the semicolon, no boilerplate code (type declarations, etc) and support for arbritarily large numbers. pointers are conspicous by their absence.

So, what did you guys cover?

Day 1

• "Hello World!"
• Conditionals, Looping constructs
• Functions
• Lists, Dictionaries and Tuples
• Basics of OOP (Classes, Objects, and explicit self)

Day 2

• Using Google to find docs
• The datetime module
• Using easy_install to install external libraries
• Exploring docs of python-dateutil module

Pretty much zero time was spent lecturing, and most time was spent actually doing things. Just as how things should have been :)

Following up

The best thing about this workshop was it did not end at closing time Day 2. It went on. We are now planning on a weekly programming competition at college, with cash prizes (sponsored by the college and Mr. Dorai Thodla). And several people have taken up solving problems on Project Euler, and we have a working game done by one of the students. That isn’t the end – one team is hoping to replace the antiquated VB6-ish management system in our library with one built in django, while another is trying to automate attendence systems using SMS.

Inspiration

So, how did it all get started? The inspiration? Hackfest. Huge thanks to vimzard, kstar and the rest of the Hackfest team who were our inspiration. I hope there is a Hackfest next year too, and that some (a lot!) of our students are more than good enough to attend and make meaningful contributions. It changed me this year, and it should continue to shape and change more people throughout the years :)

And ofcourse, no small thanks to Dorai Thodla, who helped get this entire iCell thing off the ground, and Ms. Sumathi Poobal & Mr. Ramanayagam from our college, without whose participation the iCell would’ve died a silent death. (What’s this iCell thingy anyway? A post for some other time :) )

I didn’t happen to forget someone whose name began with a K, did I?

Commitment.

I keep jumping around. My GitHub profile is proof for that. So are the large number of projects I’ve taken up only to leave in the middle. Unless and until I fix my commitment issues, I’ll be just-another-guy-who-learnt-to-code-in-his-teens, not the-guy-who-changed-the-world. Just reading a lot of stuff isn’t going to do me any good unless I actually get off my ass and do something.

Hopefully, putting this up in public will make it more real. Maybe I’ll be shamed into being more committed to whatever I choose to commit to.

It is good to jump ship when it is sinking, as long as you know where you want to go.

Here is an approximate timeline of the editors I’ve used so far:

• Turbo C++ (4th grade to 8th grade)
• Visual Basic 6 (8th grade to 10th grade)
• Visual Studio 2005 (10th grade to 11th grade)
• Visual Studio 2008 (11th grade to 1st year of college)
• gVim (1st year of college)
• GNU Emacs (after gVim)

Now, the one thing, maybe even the only thing I miss is the fact that gVim gives me the I-Bar cursor, while Emacs by default gave me the block cursor. I like the I-Bar better than the block, and so far, couldn’t figure out how to change that. It’s not helping that I don’t have access to the internet.

So what does a sane man do?

He stops using the GTK version of Emacs, and switches to the console version :D

So, I wake up at noon.

And my phone doesn’t work.

Then I find out my Internet doesn’t work.

Then I find my TV’s crapped.

Then I find that I’ve to go to college tomorrow.

The last thing is good. The others aren’t. Oh well.

One of the (good) things that came out of the IIT Hackfest was me hanging out on the #hackers-india IRC channel. It is wild, swingy and usually fun. Usually.

So yesterday night, ideamonk casually mentioned that he was working on something called pymos. It was a python script that made mosiacs. Now that was something I was totally interested in – I tried making a similar ‘script’ a long time back (in C#), and totally utterly failed, simply because I was so caught up with the part that downloaded pictures from flickr that I didn’t do the part that generated the actual Mosaic. Since ideamonk’s code already generated the mosaics (and since it was in Python), I forked it, and began to work on the to do items.

Note that ideamonk and I don’t know each other (we were apparently sitting next to each other at PyCon India ’09, but that doesn’t count!). We were on the channel, he’s commented on my blog once, and that’s about it. But still, we worked together all night fixing code. I could bore you with details of the work that was done within the next five or so hours (1 AM – 6 AM), but I will just point you to to this commit graph generated by GitHub. There was a flurry of commits, and there should be a tagged version up for download (and on PyPI) soon.

If not for github…

Let us, for a moment, assume that this code was on, say, Google Code instead of GitHub. How could I have contributed?

1. Checkout the code via SVN
2. Fix one thing
3. Send ideamonk a patch file (I can’t commit anything anywhere!)
4. Wait for him to:

4a. Open up his mail client
              
4ai. Get lost in [proggit][7] (or [FaceBook][8])
              
4b. Grab the patch file
              
4c. Apply patch
              
4d. Test things to make sure I didn’t break things
              
4e. Wonder if the code is good enough to be merged in
              
4f. Commit code with my patch in it
              
4g. Notify me that my patch is in, so i can do an svn up

5. Go to 2

No code gets committed, simply because step 4 is a huge involvement for ideamonk. Knowing that step 4 is a huge involvement for ideamonk is a huge block for me too. Obviously, he’d rather be coding than dealing with patches. Who wouldn’t? Being a developer > Being a maintainer. One of the reasons I respect maintainers of projects a lot.

Now, how does it work with github?

1. I fork it (1 click)
2. Fix one thing
3. Commit, Push to my repo
4. If there is something significant in, notify ideamonk to pull from me. Else go to 2.

Much simpler, and note that all four are things I could do myself. Nothing depends on ideamonk. Maintainence works is almost zero. Nobody has keys to the cathedral, since this is not one.

Please put your code on GitHub

It has the least amount of friction for developers looking to contribute, and the least amount of work for you as maintainer. Thanks!

For those of you who didn’t know, Waffle is a schemaless storage layer that sits on top of SQLAlchemy. Something that I was initially very interested in.

Not anymore.

Why?

Because I found MongoDB.

And fell in love.

Yes, I do know they both are different, but MongoDB has the things that attracted me to Waffle (very flexible schema, great querying, indexes) and is just as easy to set up (maybe not as easy as Waffle over SQLite, but only slightly less easier).

I <3 MongoDB. Let’s see how long this lasts!

If you are a college student, especially my college’s student, please go read this. I wish Divya had written this a year and a half back. :D

I was about to just type a list of stuff here, but that doesn’t do the topic justice. So here I am, at 3:30 in the morning, sleep cycle screwed up by the Hackfest, typing out a post on what all I learnt from there. I spent pretty much my entire awake-time at the IIT, so it helped me a lot.

Your college doesn’t matter much

IIT Envy. Every non-IITian has that. I spent a lot of time at IITM during the Hackfest, and while my IITEnvy did go up during the first few hours, it initially came down well below normal as I got to know the people better. What was cool about them was not where they were studying, but what they were doing. I could do what these guys were doing. Anyone can do what these guys were doing – there is nothing special about the IIT except maybe for the fact that it aggregates naturally dedicated people into pools. You don’t need an IIT for that – IRC will do :) I’m from a teeny college that nobody has heard of – that would have been a problem when people judged people by where they studied, rather than by what they did. Should not be a problem for me now :)

Real C isn’t hard

I was utterly clueless about GTK+ when I landed up at the IIT. The first thing I told Arun was that I was clueless about C and maybe would like to hack on something in C# or Python.

I thought I was clueless about C. All I had done was TurboC – which I had not really considered as real C till that point. However, an hour into the hackfest, I realized something – Pointers and Structures are all you need! Read the docs, read some good code, and you are done. I will probably do what I usually do to learn a new language – write a significant amount of useful code in it – in C very soon.

Code talks

I don’t have any patches against my name. The only significant piece of code I think I have written so far is this blogging engine you are reading. That needs to change.

Doesn’t mean I have to churn out code like a copier machine – I just have to have enough things to point to and be able to proudly say ‘I did that’. Great Documentation, proper deployment options and a little evangelism helps too. None of my code has any of that. That has to change too.

Know tools well

I use Emacs. But not to its fullest potential. Same thing for pretty much all of my tools – Bash/Powershell, Build Tools, etc. Heck, I can’t even write a shell script to save my life! That has to change, and change fast. I smell perl.

People on IRC are friendly

I’ve always been a lurker on IRC, just listening and not daring to speak. That changed drastically once I actually met these really nice people in person – so I can see my IRC usage going way up! It has also expanded my horizons quite a bit – meeting new people, getting to know people better, constantly being challenged to actually get off my ass and write some stuff, etc.

TODO

• Read more code. File bugs. Try to fix bugs.
• Learn Perl. Learn C. Learn C++. Get much better at Python.
• Go through my code, document all the necessary parts, create home pages for the significant ones.
• IRC more. I have been – the last two days have seen my IRC usage skyrocket.
• Stop cribbing about my life and get on with it!