The Buckblog

I honestly cannot remember being this busy for a long time.

Working to get Backpack ready has been really, really fun. I’ve been putting in more hours on this than I ever did on anything at BYU, and enjoying almost all of those hours immensely. (Ruby and Rails both have a great deal to do with that. Writing code in anything else is painfully tedious!)

However, for the first time in awhile I’ve found myself with some time. My wife has gone out to run some errands, the kids are sleeping, and I’ve just finished patching a few more Backpack bugs (yah, on a Saturday!). But what do I find? A whole slough of side projects languishing and hungry for some loving!

Specifically:

• Net::SSH. There are a few new bug fixes in the repository. I need to package release an update.
• Net::SFTP. Needs documenting badly. Once the docs are there, this is ready for a 1.0 release.
• Syntax. I fixed several bugs some time ago, and never got around to packaging a release. What I really need to do is rethink this library—the regex-based approach is simple, but also impossible to use for parsing every valid Ruby construct. Maybe its time to go with a real parser? (Yah, like I’ve got the time for that!)

Other unreleased projects that I’m working on:

• Ruby/TZ. A time-zone lib for Ruby, which will make it possible to support time zones and daylight-savings in a cross-platform manner.
• Budgetwise. A personal finance application, in rails, that makes budgets the central theme instead of a sideshow.

However, all is not well in paradise. Net::SSH and Net::SFTP are starting to annoy me. I don’t want to work on them any more, because the architecture feels too over-wrought and the interface too unplanned. Consider what a pain it is to simply execute a command and return it’s output, synchronously. (If you haven’t tried to do that yet in Net::SSH, it’s probably because you haven’t used Net::SSH. I mean, it’s got to be one of the most common use cases, and yet it’s incredibly difficult to do!) If I had it to do all over again (yah, it would be rewrite #3 of the Net::SSH stuff) I’d start with the interface and work backwards, an approach I’ve learned from 37signals that works equally well on library API’s as it does on user interfaces.

Syntax is starting to annoy me. As I said before, the regex-based parser (though fast, and 98% effective) is not a true parser. It can’t parse all valid Ruby constructs. Can’t, I say! No amount of patching will turn it into a true parser, and that knowledge makes me want to stop patching it altogether. So, if I had that to do all over again, I’d start with finding or writing a good, pure-Ruby parser and writing a syntax highlighter just for Ruby. Then, I’d do the same for HTML, YAML, and C (the other three syntaxes I do any amount of work with).

Ruby/TZ and Budgetwise are both fun projects, and I look forward to working on those, but I feel some obligation to get at least the Net::SSH and Net::SFTP libs current. Syntax, too, I guess…

I’m so conflicted! :)