Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] working

pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: pcplantdb

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] working
  • Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:20:08 -0500

Richard Morris writes:
> Chad Knepp wrote:
>
> > ...hasn't been as fun or easy as I expected. I'm feeling a lot of
> > pressure to perform in a way that is interfering with doing real work.
> > So far I've logged about an hour and a half and have struggled since
> > to get on the clock. Weird how hacking can be fun until you get paid
> > for it. Anyway, I've gotten a lot less done than I expected over the
> > weekend but I hope to hack my head into a mode that can be comfortable
> > and really kick something intersting out over the next week.
> >
> Don't worry. I was not expecting things to be easy.
> As a guide it took about a months solid work to get the
> experimental system working on ibiblio and its taken at least
> two weeks to reimplement the pfaf db for our new webserver.
> And much of that work was not any actual coding, just scratching my head
> trying to workout what the tables (objects) should be.
>
> I'd be very inclined to set the initial goals very low
> try to just concentrate on the core architecture
> getting into too much detail at this stage on locales,
> redoing plant uses, bioregions etc. is going distract from the main task.
>
> This is one of the reasons I've sugested the Hello World with objects
> as a starting point. The simplest example I could think of which does a
> proof of concept.
>
> At this stage I'd almost be inclined just to use a simple plant object
> which a bunch of text strings for a few properties. Just to get
> something working. Start small and build on that. Once thats done I'd
> probably focus on how we cope with edits. I think this is probably the
> hardest programming aspect.
>
> Money wise I think head scratching time is just as valuable as actually
> coding. From my experience of putting together complicated OO systems
> the hard part is deciding what object there are, once thats done
> the actual coding is fairly straitforward. I think it should be rewarded
> as such.
>
> I've also a suspicision that actually coding in zope will make things a
> bit harder to start with.

The problem is not actually that what I'm doing is hard, it's that I'm
getting paid for it and now I have a lot of internal expectations and
pressures to preform at top-notch capacity. I get irritated at myself
for having to look up documentation that I haven't memorized. Mostly,
it's just less fun...

I actually do a fair amount of 'head scratching time' while sleeping.
If I'm not getting something but I understand the problem, I just let
go of it (submit it to my subconscious for processing), do something
else, and then a while later the solution seems obvious.

> > Great input about locales. I think Lat/Long seems to be the most
> > important information from which most other data can be derived.
> > There also seems to be pretty comprehensive utils to find Lat/Long
> > based on geographical names. At this point I'm thinking I will use
> > Lat/Long and a climate summary (possibly derived) and as Rich
> > M. suggested build on it as needed. I'm interested in defining
> > bioregions as well with this, but I don't think it is a phase one
> > goal. Trivially a bioregion could be defined as +/- N minutes of a
> > degree.
> >
> Sounds cool. I'll hold my tongue at the moment to save us getting
> diverted, but lots of interesting ideas.

Don't hold back, if this doesn't sound right, I'd like to hear why
sooner rather than later.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page