Monday, May 12, 2008

Testopia at JavaOne?

So I just returned from a lovely week in San Francisco attending JavaOne. Why would a Perl guy go to a Java conference? Good question, but I learned a lot and can't wait to play with Groovy and Grails. I also picked up some great tips on increasing performance for Ajax apps (of which Testopia is one).

As you may have guessed, I wasn't really able to do much work on Testopia during the last week and I see there is now a Bugzilla 3.0.4 that needs to be tested. I have seen one report already that the patch does not work.

Joy! :(

One of the more interesting sessions I attended was entitled, "How to destroy your community in 10 easy steps." It was rather amusing but I learned that silence is the biggest killer. I am rather disorganized and tend to ignore email when things go crunch. Though I attempt to keep on top of the various channels of communication, often I find it gets pushed to the back burner more than it should. Before I know it, I may have gone a week or more without checking my email, or my blog. I am more available in IRC but may be too busy to answer at times. I honestly wonder how Linus keeps up with it all. Testopia is my day job, and though I love it immensely, I have never been the type to devote all my time to a single thing. When I go home, I prefer to play or work on other things. Maybe that is not what makes a good FOSS developer, I don't know. I guess the bottom line is, I will continue to develop Testopia whether anyone outside Novell finds it useful or not.

I am going to try to be better at responding more quickly to questions and bugs from now on.