Open source initiation – still going on..

Not dead, but not exactly running yet.

• I had registered in three projects – one of them almost dropped me since it is going at an amazing pace, I can’t even think about catching up now. I will have to be patient, setup tools and familiarize, do something small on my own. Two others are still alive.
• I am using Eclipse a lot these days and in the process of falling in love. I have poked around many of the features and almost familiarized it, but still haven’t formed habits around it.
• Need to learn refactoring techniques and concepts. So far, refactoring hasn’t been in the picture, even if I had written a piece of code which I know is not the best. But now I am more or less interested in writing something and getting it working fast, then if I can find fun in improving the code, it will be great.
• Installed MySQL 3.1. After a long time, I am meeting another database. I had brief encounters with IMS, DB2, SQL Server before making Oracle as the One. Even though I know that a ton of features exist in Oracle which I haven’t explored, there is new energy to find out how things work with new gadget.
• Generated SSH key using PuTTY and posted to sourceforge.

Next Steps
• Learn MySQL some and probably use it for some primitive purpose of my own – that is the only way to learn. It is boring to read documentation.
• Experiment with CVS, check in/out, commit.
• Practice the use of ant, Maven and JUnit.

I was struggling through Gregory Bateson’s “Step to an ecology of Mind” for 2 months. One snippet stuck with me – when we learn something and make a habit of it, it slowly sinks to the unknown and we won’t have to even realize that we know it (second nature or subconscious?). I need to get to that stage with this.