There has been less work lately, and I have more free time to spend on interesting and useful things.
I have resumed work on GdalTools, but the frequency and number of commits are not as high as before. Mostly small improvements and bugfixes.
From time to time, I fix bugs in my own and other people’s QGIS plugins. I also write articles and notes, not often and not very long, but still. If someone had told me 5-10 years ago that I would be writing articles, I would not have believed them. But here we are.
I’m involved in polishing and improving fTools, which is where my more or less active participation in the life of the QGIS project began: just today I submitted three more patches and picked up a few more bugs to fix.
I plan to get my hands on Ubuntu (and thus Debian) and the process of creating a LiveCD, because I want to participate in the creation of a localised (Ukrainian and Russian) version of Arramagong — LiveCD/DVD for GIS specialists.
And with the possibility that QGIS will eventually migrate from Subversion to Git, it’s a good idea to improve my skills with that version control system.
I’ve been working on several projects lately. Of course, from time to time bugs are found or users ask for additional features… All this should be written down somewhere, because there is a very high probability that you will forget some of the features/bugs by the time you can start working on them.
In this case, the most logical and convenient solution is a bug tracker. The problem is that all the options I’m aware of are web-based, but I don’t want to install Apache and MySQL and have them running all the time just for the sake of a seldom-used system. Also, I need to use it both at home and at work - so there is a need to synchronise tracker instances. So I started looking for an “offline autonomous bug tracker”, but I haven’t found anything yet.
But why? Is it really such an exotic option? It seems to me that this kind of software would be in high demand among developers working on small projects and those who, for whatever reason, can’t or don’t want to install a web server.
Programming has always fascinated me. When I was a kid, I was introduced to programming, first with Basics (I wrote programs to draw snowmen, cars, and other stuff), then Pascal, and on and on it went. One thing led to another, and after Pascal I learned C. After all that, playing computer games was no fun at all. This is probably one of the reasons why, for me, a computer is first and foremost a tool and not a game console, as it was for most of my friends and classmates.
Anyway, I never became a professional programmer, although I did get a second degree in the subject. The reasons for this are a topic for another post.
However, I did not give up programming. During my work in the regional branch of the State Land Cadastre Centre, I developed a system for maintaining a cadastral plan based on ArcView 3.2. Later, I tried (unsuccessfully) several times to present my own program — an automated system for the cadastre — to my superiors. I also write some small programs from time to time, both for work and for myself. And recently I made and sent a patch to the developers of the free file manager DoubleCommander. Not a big deal, just a small improvement, but the fact that it (the patch) was approved and included in the main tree is still pleasant. Almost at the same time, I had an idea for another improvement, which I plan to implement in code in the near future.
What is happening to me is, on the one hand, joyful. It’s experience, it’s practice, it’s growth. But on the other hand… I never noticed this before. Well, I wrote a small utility to automate some tasks, then I wrote another one… But there was no stable and constant desire to dig into the sources, fix something, add new functionality, make patches, follow the tracker. Am I sick?