In many respects, i'm not a very good geek.
Occasionally, i'll read various articles that talk about "How to hire the best" or "Finding the Golden Engineer" and it'll list a bunch of criteria for what makes an highly qualified potential employee. They'll go on about how having a PhD isn't always the #1 determinant for a good hire and how you should absolutely base your complete decision on the one thing i don't really do.
What Open Source projects did the person contributed to?
Don't get me wrong. i love Open Source. i think it's amazingly useful and i actually do read a lot about it. Heck, when Samba was just getting started i even pitched in and helped where i could. Well, until my company stepped in and told me "Nope, don't do that." (This was back in '95 when working on stuff for free was a bad idea to employers.)
Beyond that, most of the work i've done has generally always been "in-house" or quietly on the side. i've written hundreds of programs and applications. i've just never made them products. Likewise, while i probably could help out on stuff like Mozilla (heck, i get recruiter calls from them enough), i've never really dug in and gotten into that particular quagmire.
See, that's kinda my problem. If i'm going to do something, i want to work on the code. i want to fix problems or add features that are just magical because they work. Nearly every OS project i've poked around with usually has several groups of outspoken folks who toss on extra crap because it's their pet project. (i'm looking at you Mr. Little and your Links (no-longer-an) add-on.)
So maybe i should work on a project of my own.
See, i'm not a huge fan of ATP, the webcomics engine that a lot of sites use. i mean, it works ok, but the code is a mess and it does a lot of stuff it really shouldn't have to. My guess is that the guy who wrote it never really learned how to code a system and that this was his first try. Mind you, in that case, he did a bang-up job, but trust me, you don't want to go into the guts.
i've been poking around with the idea of making a new version, one that's smaller, smarter and fits the problems i've heard folks complain about. It should be small, easy for someone who is absolutely not technical to work and maintain, and damn well bullet-proof. It shouldn't assume anything other than "You have access to PHP and read/write access to at least this directory." so databases other than filesystems are probably right out. It should be designed for the future (in more ways than one) and be incredibly "skinable". Most of all, the actual presentation pages should be as light weight as one can make 'em. Cache the sweet crap out of as much as you can, or have stuff live on remote servers so your bandwidth bill doesn't break the bank.
So, i'm probably going to work on that for a while. Yeah, it's basically resume fodder, but by gosh, it's useful too. Now to think up a name….
Back when Killroy and Tina was updating on PHP, I used ATP Autosite because it was very similar to Keenspace's tag-based coding (and it auto sorted my 01012001.JPG date-numbers on images).
It got the job done in the sense that people could navigate the comic, but one misplaced file or semicolon and your day is shot if you don't know scripting language like the back of your hand. And if you DO know that, why would be using someone else's code?
Because engineers (like most folks) are phenomenally lazy and like having others do it for you. That said, while ATP "works" there are LOTS of issues I've had to fix up on the man-man site. My goal is to build something that slimmer, faster, and offers non-techie type folks the same easy interfaces they have with blogs and other stuff.
When you have something in the betas can you let me know? I don't think Joey Manley's gonna keep giving me carte blanche on Wonderella if it continues eating his bandwidth.
J.R.
Hey - ATP is old news at this point. It would be cool to see what you come up with although I'm curious what you think of some recent efforts to modify blogging software to do comics - like Tyler Martin's "comicpress" (http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress) or Brad Hawking's stripShow (http://comixpedia.com/monkeyangstannouncing_stripshow_comic_software_for_wordpress).
I've also seen a nice version of Drupal for comics by Chris Wright (Ubersoft.net) although he took it down b/c he was trying to run it on a shared account (drupal probably needs a VPS or a box for a site with ubersoft.net like traffic)
If you do go ahead with this and you're taking any requests - can you make it do multiple comic series so you can post different comic series on one site? ATP tried this but the creator pulled it b/c it was too flawed. Greg Stephens though did a nice job with it on his site zwol.org (and I've got it up at altbrand.com too) but it was also his first time writing a big piece of code and it's a bit messy under-the-hood. I like the ability to have the latest comic(s) on the front page with each series having it's own independent archives. For someone with a short attention span like mine, it's perfect :)
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How's about The Comics Program In Person? That'd have a nice abbreviation, too.