Comments on: What are you avoiding working on?

By: Sofox

Sofox — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:28:53 +0000

Wow, I thought I was unusual in this regard, having fear approaching something by all rights I should be fine at. Nice to know that other programmers have these sort of block too, and it’s not just something about experience or such.

By: Tim Post

Tim Post — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:59:24 +0000

I was really amused to see “Bugs Matching Unicode (30)” on the top of the list when checking out Openhatch, considering that anything to do with Unicode is on my ‘oh dear god no, not me … please don’t assign that to me …. ‘ list.

The other thing I avoid is anything to do with lexical parsers. I _can_ make them, I just find the entire process scary, taxing and always worry that I’m doing it completely wrong. I’m not really worried about what other people think of my first few attempts, I just worry that I can keep them to ‘just a few’ before getting it right 🙂

I will say this, every developer’s worst nightmare is seeing a patch they wrote featured on Slashdot as the cause of thousands of systems being compromised. As a maintainer, you have to be able to say “I have no #*&#(*& clue what that code actually does, I’m not touching it until I do.” That sometimes applies to code that you wrote yourself 🙂

For the most part, however, peer review is often helpful and constructive.

By: M

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:08:09 +0000

I think the problem for us is that we so fear intellectual embarrassment; we personally identify with the code we write and the kind of problems we can solve. It’s too bad that programmers aren’t more nurturing to each other.

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:11:47 +0000

Please come across to Reddit. Your openhatch project was mentioned there, but any requests for help/ideas are met with mumble-mumble-apathy.

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bcgfd/idea_organize_rlinux_monthly_meetings_to/

By the way, I dread packaging (even for Debian). I just can’t seem to get my head around it!