Well - it's pretty much midnight Saturday and I've made my final commit to CVS for the night - the fifth of the day. Good progress some might say if not for the fact that today was the first day in some three weeks that I've been able to sit in front of a PC and actually do some development. This is of course the problem with real life - it kinda gets in the way.

I think in the last few years I've experienced what every "hobby" programmer goes through. I think back a few years to University where I was able to sit down and contribute some 20+ hours of coding a week. Now of course I have a job (and have had for a number of years) which is taking ever increasing amounts of my free time. This coupled with the urge to actually leave the house hits development time quite hard for me so I never quite get as much done as I might like - hence the juggling.

However - that's life - and we cope and carry on. Fortunately I'm still around on the forums quite a bit contributing to our constant flow of development discussion - and actually things are looking rather rosey for SMF's development right now. Fortunately I am only one of a whole team of developers and Bloc and Thantos in particular have been working on some rather cool stuff of late - although I of course feel the need to stick my oar in every so often . This weekend I've been working on some boring yet rather important tweaks to SMF. Normally I don't speak about SMF development publically but as todays tasks are not so much features as they are tweaks I thought I'd describe a typical day (Which is around 4 hours worth of coding work)

Firstly, I finally nailed a long standing bug in the upgrade script which was making some of the new changes to it not quite work (Upgrade is now much cleverer in the next version). Then I finally got around to implementing an attachment change I've been wanting to make for months but never had the motivation to complete. SMF will now store the mime type of all files as they are uploaded - which, whilst it makes no difference to the end user, allows us to do better file validation on the way into SMF (As oppossed to the way out as at current) which I'm hoping will increase security ongoing and even have an (extremely small) performance benefit. After this I added a few tweaks on the "secret" stuff Bloc is working on before finally fixing another long standing package manager bug (Which took about an hour to track down and a minute to fix - the worst kind). Satisfied with my bug quashing for the day I moved on to start work on some code which will allow members to email each other without revealing their email addresses - to try reduce harvesting of emails and the like. Adding that led to me updating the way flood control works in the kind of domino effect these things have (To add X you need to add A, B, C and D first). Finally - satisfied that I've fixed as many bugs as I've probably created I thought I'd write this before bed! Oh - for info we current have some 170 open bug reports - which isn't actually all that bad for an alpha IMHO.

Anyway - no doubt anyone reading this is bored out of their mind by now. I just want to add that even though it may not seem like it from the quantity of responses from the likes of myself and other developers we do read every post in the feature request board here and many have been acted upon. Deciding what does and does not go into SMF is a difficult job and I know there will always be people annoyed that feature X or Y is missing. The hardest job for us is deciding what is a valid feature to implement as it's always a trade off between speed impact, popularity, time to implement and supportability. We'll never please everybody all of the time but I like to think we do out best.

Regards,

Grudge