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A Personal Note About Handel/Mango
Tags: mango (3)
I may moderate this off topic, but I felt it important that my statements below be made public for the sake of posterity given recent events.
<begin long brain spew>
As anyone who has read the pod or Changes file knows, I started working on Handel at the end of 2004. Handel started as a hobby project, born out of the need to convert an ASP site to LAMP and out of frustration have having to write Yet Another Damn Shopping Cart without many modules to support it [on CPAN]. In the year and a half since then, Handel 0.33 has become pretty stable with the help of a lot of tests, some kind patch submitters and TDD goodness; and we're on the cusp of 1.0, which I hope will prove to be the best release yet.
But I digress. You knew that already. The purpose of this email is to hopefully clarify my intentions with Handel and Mango as well as ward off any future problems that may arise due to my [maybe not so] unique personality traits. :-)
As I suspect most true 'geeks coders' are, I take my projects to a personal level. They're not just bits of code to put me on the fast path to CPANTS fame but instead, are obsessions. If I can't figure something out, something is broken or tests don't pass, I can't sleep; literally. I've had dreams about code I'm working one. (*cough*loser*cough*).
I liken Handel to an earwig of that tune you can get out of your head (Ring,Ring,Ring,Ring,Ring,Ring,Ring: Banana Phone!). The only way to get rid of it is to sing the tune over and over until your brain loses interest. The same is true for this project for me. I'm pushing to get everything in my head out into 1.0 so I can set it free and move on. If that makes me a control freak, then so be it. You caught me.
Since Handel is a 'personal obsession' for me, I've purposefully kept it a one man show where I can make all of the decisions and ultimately, all of the mistakes as well. I do appreciate the interest in Handel so far, as well as the patches submitted by various guilty parties. So, if you feel like I have ignored you, or spurned your offers of patches for rewrites and such, my apologies. It's not personal. It's just men battling my control-freak-obsession demons. But have no fear. Once I finish my 1.0 obsession, I fully intended to start handing out commit bits on the repo and finding a victim or two to start taking on special godlike powers. I do acknowledge that is what is needed for Handel to grow and succeed and live on.
With the recent approval of the Mango grant by The Perl Foundation, I now find myself on the cusp of another 'personal obsession'. I've made my promises for a price bed, and now have to lay in it and frankly, it scares me. Mango is a project born out of my desire to help bring Catalyst/Handel/Perl to the forefront of this Web 2.0 RoR age we live in rather than playing the bystander role. I think Catalyst is better, and I want to prove it.
So, as I work to put one personal obsession to rest, and embark on new one, I will undoubtedly piss someone off, make someone feel like their help, opinions, patches or help aren't wanted or welcome. You've been warned. It isn't personal, usually not intentional, and it's definitely not permanent.
Game on.
-=Chris