• Mood: productive
• Music: Frank Zappa -- Hungry Freaks, Daddy

Long time no hack

It's been a very long time since I've programmed meaningfully at home. Designing and programming software for a living, I focus on my other, more exciting interests in my spare time. Today, however, I spent a considerable amount of time learning and understanding a technical problem in logjam, the graphical LJ client on Unix, which has recently been made to work on Windows as well. It's still missing a few features in its Windows behavior, and I'm working on adding one such feature (asynchronous network requests, if you're curious). But gaal, wicked moose that he is, got me interested in the problem, and gave me good background and context to encourage me to hack on this. The code is written, but does not yet quite work. I think it's just a small glitch now, but I'm working with libraries I've only met today, so I may be wrong. Chances are I'll having it working later on tonight.

Anyhow, the point is that it feels very good to have done some pro-bono programming work, to have participated in a public effort that will benefit lots of people, and to have learned while doing it. Seems like I haven't lost the ability to enjoy programming.