Kevin's Weblog

Yesterday, I finally made it to one of the Calagator code sprints. I’ve been interested in this project since I first heard about it a few weeks ago, but the timing just hadn’t worked out until now.

The code sprint format was a lot of fun. Often I struggle with focus and motivation to work on my side projects, and getting a small group together all hacking on the same thing seems like a great idea. Also, because they are using pair programming I felt like I could contribute right away, even though my Ruby and Rails knowledge is minimal. I know just enough to be able to read other people’s code and usually understand the gist of it, although on my own I would spend 99% of my time looking up stuff in the docs. But, with someone else doing the typing while we talked through a new feature, I could help distill the algorithm without getting bogged down in the syntax.

During the couple hours I was there, we implemented de-duping of events and venues when a specific source is re-imported. I believe this code is now live, although it looks like there’s still some old duplicates remaining to be cleaned up. Something that was particularly nice about implementing this feature was that it was one of those satisfying cases when the codebase actually ends up cleaner and better factored when you’re finished adding as feature than it was before.

I’m definitely looking forward to participating in more of these sprints in the future. In the mean time, I’m going to spend some time trying to get familiar with the code base, and picking up my Rails reading again; and try to get to the point where I could contribute on my own. Perhaps I’ll try to squash a bug or something.