Archive for June, 2009

Server outage

Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments

The server this site is hosted on died rather spectacularly yesterday. Given my lazy attitude to backups it has taken a while to get everything sorted, but most things should be here now, I think. Comments that have been posted to the blog after November 2008 have been lost, but honestly, there aren’t a lot who post comments, so that is not that big a deal.

If you have sent me mail it should arrive here within a day or two, depending on your mail server’s setup, so replies may be slower than usual.

I should probably do something more coherent about taking backups of my site.

If you’re reading my blog through syndication this probably also means that my blog has been spamming you a bit due to changed identifiers on some posts, sorry about that.

Managing online development communities

Monday, June 15th, 2009 | Development | No Comments

A few friendly reminders to people shepherding development efforts:

  • Strike a cordial tone and do not tell people they do not understand the code.
    Doing this repeatedly to frequent contributors is even more silly.
  • Do not ignore contributions.
    It’s ok if you are busy, but indicate that by replying to the patch, do not ignore it completely.
  • If someone takes the time to go over your bug tracker and fix multiple issues, do not ignore the patches.
    See above.
  • If someone tells you that there are issues in your use of transactions, do consider it an option.
    Transactional safety is hard, it’s likely that details might have been overlooked.
  • Find a decent working process for reviewing contributions.
    Requiring contributors to bug you until you magnanimously take a look at the contributions gets very tiresome quickly and lessens the odds that said contributor will keep contributing.
  • Give constructive feedback.
    Stating ‘This sucks, but I don’t have time to explain right now.’ helps no-one but your own ego. A better approach, in case you really do not have the time, would be to write, ‘I have some concerns over the implementation that I would like to voice. I am, however, travelling for the remainder of the week and will try to reply early next week’.

That is all.