Job
Starting new job tomorrow. Scary and exciting.

Twisted
So Twisted 0.19.0 is out. I'm finally starting to feel happy about the FTP client code, after figuring out that I needed to extend DeferredList a little. It's so obvious in retrospect. I'm amazed at how enthusiastic all the Twisted developers are -- myself included. There's a strong feeling of "we need more people so we can do more cool stuff" -- it's a very friendly and welcoming project. Bug reports are welcomed and thanked, documentation contributions are particularly appreciated... Twisted is getting to the stage where I could say it is well-documented and keep a straight face.

It's amazing how much difference a positive development community makes, at least to me, a potential developer. Before I started playing with Twisted, I contributed a few patches to another project (which shall remain nameless). While I've no doubt that the people behind it are nice people, you quickly get discouraged when your posts to the mailing-list get completely ignored (except by a couple of other users). While I'm not so arrogant as to think my work was flawless, some acknowledgement from the developers would have been appreciated. Some criticism explaining why my patches were not included would've been even better. Anyway, about a year later, that particular feature is still on the "todo" list for that project, and I spend my time working on other, more rewarding, things. It took very little effort to become involved in Twisted, thanks to their active encouragement of potential developers.

Twisted is slowly accumulating random fun bits on its way to 1.0 (which isn't looking so far away anymore). There's an implementation of the "MouseMan" serial mouse protocol in 0.19.0. There's also signs of an ssh implementation coming soon...

linux.conf.au 2003
I see that they've extended the deadline for abstracts by 2 weeks. That means I get to sleep a bit longer tonight, and worry about it later...