Programming is pain (sometimes)

Last night I went to bed completely frustrated. I had spent probably 6 hours staring and poking at a piece of code and thinking what on earth could be wrong with it. It seemed functionally identical to the code I had been using as a guide, yet it didn't work. It didn't do anything - generate error messages, any messages at all - it just got silently ignored by the framework. Why, why, why, is all I could think about before going to bed.

But what I've learned and seen reinforced over and over again is - if you get completely stuck, step away from the problem for a while. Take a nap or a shower or watch a movie or do something to take your conscious mind away from it. Sure enough, when I woke up and went back at it, less than 1 hour in I spotted the discrepancy. I had a function included in a class definition, while my example code had the function outside the class. So I took it outside and hey presto it worked perfectly.

It still sucked though to have to go through all that frustration.

Great moments in Views 2 coding history

After scrabbling through source files and scrutinizing tantalizing yet incomplete docs, I finally got Views 2 to disdainfully acknowledge that yes, I was in fact a views style plugin.

SoC 2008 is on

This year I'll again be participating in Google's Summer of Code program and again with the Drupal org. My mentor will be Gordon Heydon. My project is adding output for microformats and RDF and JSON to Views, so content on a site can be easily exposed to semantic web agents and mashups. I'm really stoked about this project because it's going to be really interesting programming for the Semantic Web and I can envision countless uses for it when it's brought to fruition. I've been wanting to explore the fascinating world of semantic web data for a long time and now I'm going to get paid for it - how cool is that :D

This is my second SoC and just like last year I'm looking forward to meeting all types of brilliant interesting folk. I've always felt that one of the most important bits of SoC, besides the $4500 paycheck and the cert and the prestige (and of course the swag,) is the really cool people you meet on the way. I've already made friends with really brilliant people hanging out on IRC and hope to make more. So props to Google for giving students this fantastic opportunity.