Creeva’s World 2.0

I pre­vi­ously wrote about gnome con­duit a cou­ple weeks ago, since then I’ve been actively chas­ing it in numer­ous ways.  I have joined the mail­ing list for it and have become one of the main doc­u­men­ta­tion writ­ers for the end-user side of the party.   I’ve put a lot of work in and dis­cov­ered some nuances along the way.

This is the first open source I’ve worked on, mostly since I’m not a pro­gram­mer.   The Com­modore Vic-20’s basic with it’s ERROR IN LINE 2340 after 8 hours of typ­ing and then hav­ing another error show up after that, etc,etc com­pletely destroyed any pro­gram­ming moti­va­tion I may have had.   Script­ing I don’t mind since scripts are usu­ally sim­pler.   There lies the crux of my dilemna.  Python is the back-end power of Con­duit.   Python is also almost as much of a script­ing lan­guage as it is a pro­gram­ming lan­guage.   Con­duit may be inspir­ing me to learn more Python.   We shall see.

Since I wasn’t a pro­gram­mer join­ing an open source project really seemed kind of fool­ish to me.   I would be that guy who wears the red shirt to go down on the planet in Star Trek.  Even if I lived, I would still be in the back­ground and unno­ticed.   Like I said in my pre­vi­ous post how­ever is that Conduit’s doc­u­men­ta­tion was ter­ri­ble (and the dev’s admit­ted as much) .  I have become much bet­ter at doc­u­ment­ing and tear­ing through pro­grams and gath­er­ing the nuances the best an end-user can.   I have taken this for­ward and done what I could to help out the Con­duit project.

I can prob­a­bly say with lit­tle doubt that I know Con­duit as well as if not bet­ter any other end-user around (I’m not going to try­ing to com­pete against the devel­op­ers or any pro­gram­mer that can dis­sect the code).  I can say that there are still bugs and things that don’t work for me.   The devel­op­ers are recep­tive though, but like many other peo­ple have lives and can’t  ded­i­cate every­thing to a project that are not mak­ing any money on.   This means they need all the sup­port they can get.   If you are a python pro­gram­mer and like the ideas of inter­ac­tion with Web Ser­vices and the desk­top — get over there.   If you have other skills or help you can bring to the table, they def­i­nitely will take it.

Since I’ve been work­ing on the doc­u­men­ta­tion they have had two releases 0.3.7 and 0.3.8 — granted 0.3.8 was a quick release to fix bugs intro­duced by 03.7, but never the less it was two releases.   They are push­ing hard towards 0.4.0 and I’m doing my best to test and ver­ify the lit­tle things to help out.  So I guess I’m mov­ing into one of the main end-user testers in this arena.   Maybe I’ll get pro­moted to head Q&A Engi­neer and Doc­u­men­ta­tion  Lead in the project.  I’m sure it will be a nice pay jump from noth­ing to the lucra­tive marker of nothing.

I’m jok­ing of course, what I want to see is the appli­ca­tion I want to use to work the way I want it to.   I could sit back and com­plain like most aver­age Amer­i­cans.  I’m sick though of the why should I help when I can make some­one else do the work atti­tude.  If you want some­thing to work the way you want it to get involved.   As long as your not too pushy you won’t get the stan­dard stereo­typ­i­cal answer “pro­gram it yourself”.

I have learned through this that if you are a not a pro­gram­mer there are still things you can con­tribute to any open source project.  Whether it be doc­u­men­ta­tion or man­age­ment of mod­ules, there are jobs and areas that can be done to help the com­mu­nity.   Peo­ple seem to for­get that pro­gram­mers can’t do every­thing, and time is time.   Time taken away from pro­gram­ming means that less progress is made.   Time focused on pro­gram­ming means that doc­u­men­ta­tion and pol­ish­ing isn’t a pri­or­ity.   Because of this any­one can con­tribute to some extent to an open source project.

Whether it’s one lit­tle piece to the over­all pic­ture or a lead in a project you can make a dif­fer­ence.  The lead on Con­duit, John Stow­ers,  hasn’t scoffed or attacked me for my ideas in help­ing con­duit.  He’s been recep­tive and cour­te­ous the whole time, though I’m sure some of my ques­tions have dri­ven some of the devel­op­ers up the wall.  I’ve been busy mak­ing their mail­ing list active.    I can say that com­pared to alot of projects, the peo­ple behind this have true heart and believe in what they are doing and envi­sion the power the appli­ca­tion can have.

Now if I could only get my youtube and google con­tact syncs work.….