Long time no update. Since my last entry, I've basically dropped out of being an active developer on any project--- much to my frustration, but I think it's just a matter of life refocusing. Spent a long time working on a very very large Zope CMF system, went through major angst, transitioned, burned out on software, decided to pursue a Ph.D. in history. My profile, recently updated, has the rest.

Anyone need a contract hacker?

Still busy. Still biking; I'm almost up to 5 days a week. I've been doing lots at work; helping figure out what a good content management system for us would look like. Also, I've been reading about Extreme Programming. We're going to try an experiment at work to see if we can get XP to be feasible here, since everyone's said positive things about it at various times.

Reefknot work has been slim this week for various reasons, but we're expanding the CVS developer pool again, and we have a developer who's helping us get our RFC-compliance tests kicked into shape. This is a good thing.

Been busy this week at work and not-at-work. It's been swelteringly hot, so much so that I've stayed at work late most nights for the A/C. Less personal-project work than I'd like.

LotR and I have been working on rewriting the Reefknot Bootstrap Guide, expanding and adding things here and there. We're trying to get a good new version out soon to further enlighten the masses about RFC2445 and Reefknot. Maybe I'll finish that this weekend. Rich and I are hacking out changes to Date::ICal that'll let us do timezones properly at last.

The reefknot-devel list has 55 subscribers as of this morning, which makes me very happy. We've had a herd of new interested-people as a result of Skud's talk at YAPC::Europe. Some of them are even sending us patches. We've got promising leads for new developers from the datetime at perl dot org list too, which is nice.

I've made contact with the author of Request Tracker (RT), who's local to Boston. He seems to be interested in adding calendaring to RT, which is a ticket-tracking system. Meeting with him on Monday to bootcamp him into the code. I'm hoping that will work out well.

Spent last night squashing bugs and whatnot in Net::ICal. We had a bunch of tests that were marked failing intentionally--- as an attention-getter mostly, so that we know to write tests in the future. I changed them to TODO tests, which finally work in the latest version of Test::More (thanks to Michael Schwern). That way, they don't overtly fail, but they're still there as markers that we should be testing certain routines more.

After some late-night release-candidate testing with the help of IRC people, I released Net::ICal 0.15, an alpha release with some packaging fixes and better tests. The other major improvement is that it begins to support timezones. I'm really itching to get timezones working properly in Net::ICal.

Started working on defining what will be in Reefknot 0.01. LotR is being helpful with this.

Recruit Recruit Recruit

I really need to talk to someone who wants to write a web-based calendaring app as an example we can distribute with Net::ICal. The cool thing is, this web-based calendaring app should be able to share information with lots of other programs--- anything that uses iCalendar. If you've got time, tuits, and basic Perl skills, mail me and I'll hook you up.

We also need some QA/testmaster sorts to LART us into writing more robust code. We've got a testing framework, and the beginnings of some automated smoketests, but I don't have enough time to manage it all by myself.

Other bits of life

Biking continues to keep me happy. I've discovered that I actually prefer biking to driving, which was kind of surprising. Somehow, biking feels much more... physically connected than driving. I have better senses on a bike, and the road has a texture that it lacks when I'm in a car. I'm beginning to understand why some of the Critical Mass folk call them "cages". Whoosh. I'm now up to 4 roundtrip commutes a week, which is about 80 miles. Yay for getting closer to goals.