Yet another post.

In the middle of OPW internship

I originally thought taking part in FOSSOPW is a great chance to lift my coding skills and I shouldn’t miss it. As time passes by, I now have a new thought towards it.

# 1 It do improves your coding skill.

Zack, Matthieu and I often have discussions on coding style. For example, once Zack said, “For code like this, you should explicitly use an if/else clause, not if-return.” I was totally unaware of this sort of issue. Actually I even didn’t know how I should call this problem. Matthieu gave me a detailed FYI link on this in no time.

Besides, my completeness of thinking is also trained. Recently, I was fixing a “HTTP GET Method ?suite=suite-name” issue. It’s a trivial task. And you know most trivial tasks require lots of scattered modification on the source code base. I did have fixed most places, such as the pages of “/src/packagename” and “/search/”. Zack did a thorough review, and pointed out that the pages rendered by “/prefix” has some malformed urls in the HTML. Waiiiit, I should have noticed it. But somehow I missed it. Maybe because my mind was wandering at that time? This made me think, I shall have a thorough view of what I should do before getting my hands dirty. Or more preferably, if I could write down what I exactly want to achieve before coding, then silly problems definitely wouldn’t occur. This may sound a little bit like TDD. ;).

# 2 It makes you look like a (not-that-good) ninja.

I use a macbook. It’s not my fault! I’ve tried several times, but I never successfully find a laptop that is not capable of boiling eggs when running Debian. (and especially KDE+Debian). So I have no way but switched to OSX. The development of Debsources happens on a remote Ubuntu LTS (now Debian SID, haha) virtual machine. Of course I have to install all the dependency on my own, e.g., Postgres, set up port-forwarding, e.g., ssh -D, write automate shell scripts, e.g., dash, but more importantly, I am forced to live under the dark terminal with no GUI. You know the feeling when pain hurts? Yes, exactly! But I survived. How shall I call myself now? A dedicated with-a-lot-of-useless-plugin-installed vimmer? A fond-of-fancy-window tmux-er? Yep, both. I finally found a comfort zone under the black-white-blinking screen. I wonder how people feel when they see a girl hanging out in the library, facing a full-screened black console, typing at a speed of 140wpm (Yeah, I am kidding). I don’t know, but please don’t call me a geek. Show me your respect, I am a ninja!

# 3 It tells you communication is the most important.

I bet anyone who has participated in a group-based project would understand what I mean. For one perspective, communication helps to eliminate misunderstanding. So I won’t doing some useless stuff for all day and finally find out that it totally doesn’t meet the requirement. On the other hand, it speeds up your learning process. I often have problems on git. So in the email I will complain if I mess up with the git repo. After a short while, my dear mentors will reply in detail on how to correctly do the git stuff.

My OPW journey is cool! ;).