This is in reply to Ozh’s comment from my contributors shouldn’t care about recognition. I have the tendency to write a great deal in comments, but 600+ words is kind of long for a comment.
Nah, I sort of can’t now. The reason I allude to leaving the community often is that I have a history of working on a project and then leaving after I become bored with it. My history with joining the WordPress Community is the exact opposite of Mark Ghosh, in that I entered the community after many years of programming and many failed projects, therefore thought I knew more than the members of the community. I was very wrong and I apologize for my arrogance.
It doesn’t help that the project I was working before WordPress had strict guidelines with Unit Tests (test cases actually run in the unit test environment), strict everything must have inline documentation, and must have DocBook manual explaining how to use the code. It is funny that I became very bored with it on that project very quickly, but I’ve been focused on it with WordPress since after several months of complaining about it when I joined the community.
WordPress is far to interesting to just leave and I can’t exactly leave until the inline documentation is complete, which it has taken almost a full year in order to do so. I’ve had help along the way, which is great.
With the WordPress PHP extension, I’m going to have something to focus on that will keep me within the community for a long time or at least until I get bored with that project, which as fascinating as it is, I doubt it will be soon.
I’ve decided to use WordPress as the base of all of my browser game projects, so I’ll be continuing to enhance and fix bugs that I find.
Also, since I’m going to have strict test case requirements, I’m going to need to focus some more on the WordPress test case code coverage and that will take up to a year or more to complete.
I know that eventually, WordPress will no longer have something to teach me and when that happens I’ll no longer have a purpose staying in the community. Right now, WordPress has too much that I can learn and people to learn from. I could learn from other projects, but there are enough masters in WordPress that I’ll do fine here. I think I can do more being in the WordPress community than I would be able to in other project communities.
Quality assurance is still lacking within WordPress and while there are people working on the field within Automattic and in the community, there needs to be even more people. I have a few projects that I want to work on in this field for WordPress that will be totally kick ass. Unit tests, functional testing, and acceptance testing test cases are a few.
Basically:
- Inline Documentation
- Codex Documentation (User and Developer manuals)
- Unit test cases (running test cases separately from WordPress execution)
- Functional test cases (running test cases with WordPress)
- Acceptance test cases (Selenium + PHPUnit)
Along the way BackPress is going to be engineered into WordPress and while I don’t agree with the direction it is going, I don’t know enough to help. I think it would be a great experience to learn more about Class Design Patterns and put in practice what I’ve learned in that field. When BackPress is merged into WordPress, I’ll know enough to improve upon the code.
Along the way, it should prove to be a great learning experience for Object Oriented programming. Something that I’m lacking full knowledge and experience. Even though, I’ll be developing using objects for more than two years now.
Leave now? And miss all of the great opportunities that are going to come up with learning, development, and supporting others? I think not. I think there should be enough to keep me interested in this shiny object called “WordPress”!
Possibly Related Posts:
- Game Engine Development and Open Source
- Plans for Base CMS
- Project Plans
- Calibre Improvements Part 2
- Usability Testing Software Development