The Lair

A few weeks ago, there was a huge buzz around a new blogging software project named Habari. I heard of it then and wandered over to the IRC channel to take a look at the product. The people behind the project were already known to me through other IRC channels and I was quite keen to find out what they had been cooking up.

Other people have already done the introductions and the guiding principles behind Habari. They’ve also partly addressed the FAQ aspect; particularly a generic answer to why we need yet another blogging application in a market that is already rather crowded. Wordpress works, doesn’t it? Why do we need to bother reinventing the blog software wheel?

I run Wordpress on the Lair, as I have done for the last couple of years. It’s not everything I want it to be – but realistically, I don’t know if any blogging application could be that without a lot of custom additions. I’ve also been following Wordpress development (and development of some of the plugins) for a while and I’ve occasionally given back fixes, albeit minor ones. But there’s no reason why blogging software development couldn’t be done differently; or dare I say it, better.

I think it’s more interesting for me to explain why I personally decided to contribute to Habari development.

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Like most practicing software engineers today; I’ve worked with version control before. Only, I’ve been involved in commercial projects with lots of rules (mandated automatic checkouts, lots of JUnit tests run before and after changes) and a fair degree of stricture.

Today, I uh … checked in a piece of code to a public open source project. As per my luck, this piece of code promptly barfed and left a messy stain on the keyboard and carpet. Not to mention more than a little egg on my face.

Can you imagine the stress that people face when there is a deadline looming and they’re scrambling to finish something? Trust me, it’s nothing compared to the feeling of utter panic that sets in whch you realize that you’ve ummm.. broken the build for potentially hundreds of people and you’d better fix it. toot sweet. And the tooter, the sweeter.

Some faffing around and ineffectual flailing later, I actually backed out the broken changes, tested, checked out to make sure there were no subsequent revisions, tested again and committed. Order was restored. Apparently, this process took 40 minutes. It seemed like much less at the time. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen before a few bleeding edge SVN updating hawks had noticed the breakage. Gah. BURRRRRN.

According to the Pragmatic Programmers, breaking the nightly build gets the luckless developer an award of a dunce cap. I think I’ll hunt around for some headgear for the rest of the day.