Stuff you learn about when it breaks

Somewhere in my basement I have a copy of Winograd and Flores' Understanding Computers and Cognition, required reading in some late-1990'es HCI course. Just about the only thing I remember from that book is this quote: "The word processor exists as a collection of hardware or programs only when it breaks down." This is in the sense that you don't think about a tool which doesn't get in the way, and only when it fails (or is missing), you notice it and start to analyse it.

Fast forward some 13 years, a few days ago, I finally got around to writing some better UI tests of WTP's "XPath View", using SWTBot as the weapon of choice. Having read the SWTBot getting started docs and some useful blog posts, writing my tests were soon well underway, using the fluent API provided. It is fun to watch the application speeding along like time-lapse film, like magic.

Everything went fine until I wrote code to switch the XPath view's active process from XPath1.0 to XPath2.0, using the view's menu. The API was pretty easy to figure out, but the view menu finder just didn't pick up the menu item I wanted.

There's my breakdown: Why?

Well, it turns out that unlike regular menus and context menus, view menus are collected in a different fashion by SWTBot, by examining the contributions rather than enumerating the SWT objects themselves. Some corners cases are not covered. Not a big deal, really, but it made me look at the source for SWTBot, which is quite a pleasant sight. Now it exists as real code in my mind, as does the Eclipse command framework implementation. And I also now "get" the Hamcrest Matcher framework which I've previously thought to be horribly over-engineered.

With my new knowledge, I can even extend SWTBot. Nice.

Then fast forward two more days, while this blog post was sitting half-finished in my browser, Saturday evening, after historic amounts of rain in the area, my basement was flooded: The sewer couldn't contain the rain, and the system broke down and came very much into existence, as sewage water gushed up from the drains and toilet and my otherwise dry basement became a 20cm deep paddling pool, allover. Getting the water out took hours; getting the smell out will take days, maybe weeks.

Like software, sewage is something most people would rather not have to deal with. It's supposed to be "invisible magic", but in reality it is messy and complicated, and when it doesn't work, it makes for a shitty situation -- yet our society very much depends on it.

The really strange part is the book: I haven't found it yet, not in the "dry" pile, the "slightly damp but fine" pile, the "soggy yet perhaps readable" pile, or the "discard" pile. I know that book must be down there somewhere, and when I find it, it's going back into my reading queue right away.

P.S: My flooded basement was a picnic compared to the flood in Pakistan. Consider donating to your favorite charity!

Autonomy, Mastery, and bug 313989

Dear diary: About a week ago, I took out a full 10 minutes from my day job to watch an interesting video on YouTube about what motivates people, as recommended by David Carver.

The video explains what might motivate people (who typically hold a challenging and rewarding day job) to contribute their efforts, for free, to open source projects, and it really got me thinking (spoiler alert -- go watch it first): The video concentrates on three significant drivers for motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and a Sense of Purpose. I considered this is terms of my WTP interests:

• "Autonomy" is right on target: Nobody told me to get involved with web tooling in Eclipse, this is purely an itch. For a free-time contributor, I believed I scratched my itch really good.
• "Mastery" is on target too, since nothing teaches you a spec(*) as well as trying to implement it, or filing a bug against said implementation. It's nerdy, but rewarding!
• "A Sense of Purpose" is a bit more difficult... What is the purpose of contributing to an open source project, anyway? Is it ... mastery for the sake of professional/career development? ... just "scratching an itch"? ... to improve the quality of a common resource? ... to earn the respect of my peers? ... to make the lives of users (other developers) easier? I'm not sure I have a clear answer on this one, but it got me thinking.
  

I wouldn't have taken as much notice if my watching this video didn't coincide with the WTP 3.2 RC2 build, which I took for a spin, and found three really annoying defects (bug 313989 being the most trivial of those). These bugs weren't really enough to warrant PMC reviews and all that process, but to me, they felt just like when you notice the first scratch on the paint of your brand new car: Sure, you realise it's probably going to get worse -- but you would have preferred not to know about it.

The point is this: I should have found those bugs earlier! If I hadn't been so busy investigating all kinds of other unrelated, non-WTP stuff (issues in Xalan and Hibernate, besides investigating how face recognition works, just because...) I could have done much better! Boom, there goes my sense of purpose, no matter how I look at it: Lost in unfocused dabbling.

So my conclusion was this: The "sense of purpose" motivating me to work with WTP is to develop the best IDE for working with XML schemas and documents, and to make our XPath2 implementation consumable for the likely adopters.
My open source effort will be concentrated on that (WTP+XML) for the next two years: Make it to the New and Noteworthy. So while I might take other tools for a spin (Xtext rocks!), those other projects shouldn't wait up for patches from me -- for the next two years.

P.S. And dear diary: I promise to write more often.

*: XML, XML Schema 1.0, SOAP 1.1, XML Catalog, XPath 2.0, XSLT 1 & 2, XML Schema 1.1, the list goes on.

Random acts of kindness

With Helios M6 in the mold, now is the time to send a big 'thank you' to the ladies and gentlemen making all this possible, the unsung heroes of the more-or-less-oiled machinery called 'build', the closing-time-panic induced commitathoners, the map-file conflictinators, the cooler of the cool 'hope-the-next-build-will-be-green'-cats, the ... well you know who you are!

Thank you all very much!

For those of you going to EclipseCon this year, I recommend buying a pint for your build-wizard. But don't overdo it in case somebody (could be me) breaks a build somewhere!