Hackfest ’09 – Expectations

I’m going to participate in Hackfest at IITM’s Shaastra, starting tomorrow. Will hopefully be a lot of fun – and may I be able to contribute my first ever patch during the event ;) Got permission to not get back home – but wondering, where would I stay? Probably pass out in front of the computers :)

I’ll be hackin on GNOME Apps – hopefully Banshee (since that’s one app I love), or write a newish, smallish app with PyGTK. Anything would do but :)

Will be blogging more – Sadly, no camera, so no pictures :(

Anyone else coming along?

Code I’ve written so far

Code I have written so far:

  1. HiSlain: A static blog publishing system (NOT A DJANGO BLOG!). Runs this blog
  2. wtfimb: The code that powers Busroutes.in
  3. frailgrey: Markov Chain based page generator (pretty lame, actually)
  4. GoodFather: Collection of utils for web data scraping and storing
  5. reappy: A Twitter Search Application Framework
  6. SadIvy: A pure WSGI URL Shortener

Now, I’ve been doing a shit job of documenting them – none exists. Nor of writing tests – none exists. That should hopefully change soon :)

HiSlain and reappy are where I’m going to concentrate my efforts on for the next month or so.

Task List for HiSlain

  • Refactor code, clean it up so it doesn’t look like proof for the Infinite Monkey Theorem
  • Add support for raw, unmanaged pages
  • Port a decent looking, simple theme to HiSlain
  • WRITE DOCUMENTATION!
  • Write some tests, and refactor the code to make it more testable
  • WRITE MORE DOCUMENTATION!

Task List for reappy

  • Write a real application with it, so bugs can be fixed in the process
  • DOCUMENTATION!
  • Write some tests and refactor the code to make it more testable
  • MORE DOCUMENTATION!
  • Examples.

And ofcourse, new sub-pages over here for both of them (atleast). Stay tuned!

Lessons learnt from working with the Symposium

  • Document Everything! On paper. Will save you from hell later.
  • There is never enough time. Start earlier than you think is early enough.
  • Sell people things. Make them want it. Think from their point of view.
  • Prioritize.
  • Delegate. Responsibly. And follow up.
  • Know when to stop. Recognize when something is good enough.
  • Printing takes a long time. Very long timeE. And is boring.
  • People often do not mean what they say. Very often
  • Indoor photography requires a good camera.
  • Old people think in weird ways.
  • Different people prioritize differently.
  • Promises are worth shit. Usually.
  • Fight. It’s worth it.

3hours of code & 1 blog post per day

Those are my new goals.

I’ve got a mechanism to track the code accomplishments (will make that public soon), and maybe I’ll write a widget for HiSlain for the blog post/day accomplishment.

I’m liking it so far – 7 hours of code yesterday, along with 2 blog posts. Couldn’t hit my code target today – but am hitting my blog target. I should figure out more ways to make this work better.

Let’s see how much I could stick to it.

Premature Greying

He liked her. Very much. He had never felt like that before. The butterflies in his stomach were beating up a storm. He had never believed in love at first sight. Till he saw her.

Her waitress uniform made her look cuter than ever. He knew he had to ask her out. He drummed up enough courage, went to her and said ‘Hi’.

She turned, gave him a cute smile, and replied ‘Hello uncle, what can I do for you?’

The Automatic Quote Generators (aka AutoPeople)

An Automatic Quote Generator – generates sound bites that almost sound like someone else, and are somtimes funny as hell:

A few of them (@AutoLG & @AutoMona) also have twiwtter bots for them, posting short tweets once every seven minutes.

And ofcourse, I open sourced the code for all this – and made it available on github :)