Tim\'s picture      Blogging Ottinger (tim)

2006-September-22

It’s not the programming.

Filed under: Angst, Programming

It’s a frustrating time for me. Programming is pretty easy and pretty natural, but it seems like programming is less and less the job we’re doing. I tend to spend our time deep-code spelunking for some clues as to how to use things sometimes and that’s natural, but most of the time we spend in configuration and research. I was noticing that sometimes writing a 10-line program will require 20 or more lines of configuration, all of the kind that require a pretty deep knowledge of the servers and services you’re working with.

My supybot experiences continue.

It was a realization of mine (that I could have kept quiet) that I don’t really have any interest in a supybot hobby. I wanted to write some code to do some things for some people who are big fans of irc bots. I do this out of interest in them, but no real interest in chat bots. Unfortunately, there is a lot of necessary prerequisite learning about things that don’t interest me. I don’t want to be a chatbot expert. I don’t care what plugins already exist. I don’t want to run a bot. I don’t want to build more custom plugins. All I want to do is make it better for some friends who do use it.

I only want to write code, test it, and check it in. Beyond that, it is all nuisance. I fear it’s insulting to tell the supybot volunteers that fact, but I did it without really thinking. Kinda fell off my fingertips. All I want is a programmer’s quickstart so I can do my thing and get on with my life. The last thing I need right now is a hobby that requires some kind of commitment from me. I don’t want to run it from my machines, I don’t want to configure it any more than absolutely interested, and I’m not interested in the things I could potentially do with it.

But there’s no programmer’s quickstart. We can read examples, and we can read the source. There you go. If you can figure it out, that’s what you get. But it’s the python code that’s easy. The difficult stuff is in knowing the world that the code has to live in (which the the part NOT documented).

Ah, well, that’s life.

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  1. Bitacle Blog Search Archive - It’s not the programming.

    […] Programming is the fun part of softwre, but the hard and uninteresting part is admin and it becomes more than half the work

    Trackback by bitacle.org — 2006-September-23 @ 08:00

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