User:MarkAHershberger/Weekly reports/2010-W28

I speent Week 28 (Jul 12-Jul 16) in California, meeting people face-to-face and re-orienting myself with the new goals I've set for myself.

F2F
I was finally able to meet several of the people I've been working with online in person. I felt my conversations with RobLa, mdale, Catrope, Ariel, and Trevor were especially helpful during and after Gdansk.

While other core developers were already very familiar with the process problems, traveling to Gdansk and then debriefing with Danese and RobLa about the process problems (e.g. code review and release timing) showed me that I need to redouble and refocus my efforts on Code Review and helping Tim get releases out the door by helping him manage any blockers that he doesn't have time or bandwidth to deal with.

Another benefit of the F2F meetings was helping Ariel with his Emacs configuration and updating the coding conventions page with an Emacs configuration that actually works.

Code Review
One of the blockers was a security patch by Catrope that needed to be reviewed. After Catrope committed the code, I set about reviewing it.

I'd been avoiding code review up till this point, in part, because it didn't seem as interesting as working on the code itself. Once it became clear to me how much extra hands were needed in code review, though, I dove in.

After reviewing, commenting, and fixing a few pieces of code that I found through CR, it ended up being very gratifying. Instead of grumbling to myself about the ugliness of this or that code, CR empowered me to get people to fix their own code — or at least comment on it and then fix it myself.

Certainly there is the issue of trust — whose taste or sense of security do we trust when it comes to CR — and I don't feel qualified to say who should be trusted or not at this point, but after a few months of working on the MW codebase, it felt good to be able to “give back” in this way.

Misc
As a result of doing the code review, I was able to get more exposure different parts of the code in the VCS. This included, for example, worker.py and the planets.