A week of code

This post is going to be a bit lighter on the hard content than my usual, but I had a great week of code and I feel like writing about it.

Developments with brewdo led it all off. Last Saturday, I finally added install code, and started down the path of configuring the user's Sudo configuration for them—something that took me awhile because I didn't want to screw it up. I came up with a solution I was finally comfortable with and merged it, but when I studied the result I decided that brewdo in its current form had crossed that line where bash is the wrong language to do it in. So I decided to finally write my first Ruby program by porting brewdo.

I'd been looking at Ruby on and off for some months now, mostly because it's very difficult to get away from. It's everywhere today, much like Perl once was—and I'm not even doing Rails. zigg_ebooks runs on it, by way of the excellent twitter_ebooks (though I'm probably running the only installation on OpenBSD. I'd read Ruby code and even tried to contribute a few small things here and there, but this was my first swing at doing it for real.

I think it went fairly well, but it was just a bit of a frustrating experience, even when dealing with just the readily-available standard library (my goal was to have one self-contained script) and not digging into the peripheral toolset. The documentation I found was thin, and more than a few times I could see how to do something, but I found myself wishing there was a better way. But maybe that's in part because it was my first hit; with time, maybe I'll appreciate it more. Regardless, the end result was definitely an improvement over the bash version, and the investigation quite stimulating.

As I was working through testing the various incarnations of brewdo, something else really bothered me–my virtual machine workflow for testing. Running OS X in VirtualBox is a solved problem, but it's shockingly inconvienient compared to the workflow I'd become used to using Vagrant with octothorpe. Buying VMware and the Vagrant VMware plugin was an option, but I decided instead to go looking to see if I could get this all working with VirtualBox instead.

This led me down another path that resulted in me finally having my excuse to look at Go. People have been taking stabs at the OS-X-on-VirtualBox Vagrant problem for a little while now, but the end result was compromised by Packer—the tool of choice for building Vagrant boxes—not supporting mounting the OS X install image on a virtual SATA connection instead of IDE. So I went in and, over the course of several hours (it takes a long time to re-run the OS X installation!), implemented this feature for Packer.

Doing this, of course, meant learning a little Go. In contrast to Ruby, Go immediately made sense to me. I was initially a bit weirded out by its build system (particularly the bit about automatically fetching code from repositories all over the place), but the more I ruminate on it, the more I'm intrigued. Now I want to have a Go project, but it's probably silly to rewrite brewdo once again—I'll have to come up with something else, I suppose.

The great part about all of this, though, is not necessarily what I've accomplished (though I'm pretty proud of that, too!) but the fact that I've been able to exercise my code muscles in a way I haven't done much of in awhile. I think there's a core truth here about not letting oneself get dull, something I had once done with a past employer for far too long, accepting "maintenance mode" in the name of fiscal security. Being able to break out, explore, see faults (in myself or in code) and constantly improve is what feeds me and drives me.

So, yeah, it's been a great week. And I'm hoping that I can do it again soon.