If you use David Deraedt’s great AIR SQLite administration tool Lita, you probably already saw that he just pushed an update (v. 1.2) a few days ago. Aside from my general happiness from seeing that this release fixes some bugs and adds new features that were important to me, this release has personal significance for me as well. As David noted last week, I have joined him as a contributor to the project. So in fact, some of those bug fixes and new features were done by me! I’ve discovered that there are few feelings greater than wanting a feature in a tool you use every day, and then actually implementing it. =) Upgrading is more fun when you see your own bugs in the release notes, too =)
As David pointed out, the fact that I’m an Adobe employee and am participating in the project doesn’t mean it’s now an official Adobe product (for good or bad). I’m doing this 100% on my own time. And my role is still pretty small – David is certainly the lead, main, primary, controlling, etc. author. I just file bugs as I find them, add some comments about feature requests, and fix issues when I know how to.
In case you’re curious, the back story is really pretty straightforward. I started writing my own version of an AIR SQLite admin tool back before AIR beta 1, but never had time to take it beyond a “query runner” tool. Late in 2008 I discovered Lita, and once I started using it I realized that 1) it is implemented in a similar way to many of the ideas I had, and 2) It’s already got a big head start in features, so there’s not much point in me trying to “compete” or anything like that, especially for something that I wasn’t planning to make money from.
After using it for a while I discovered a few bugs, and decided to email David about them. (He and I had communicated a bit previously, about the encrypted database functionality added in Adobe AIR 1.5 and how to integrate it into Lita.) I think I probably mentioned in that message that I would be willing/interested to fix issues myself as I have time. Fortunately David was very kind and accepted my offer. So, as I said, now when I find issues I get to fix them myself, which is nice because I can fix them quickly, but also adds some responsibility since now the burden is on me to make those changes myself =)
As a side note, I really want to point out that David is a really great developer – something I appreciate greatly as we work in the same codebase. It is a big testament to his architectural and coding skills that I was able to dive right in and fix four bugs/feature requests in a very short time (literally a matter of minutes after first looking at the code). I’ve learned a lot just from seeing his code, and now I’m anxious to read his “Flex Architecture Fundamentals” series to learn more about the thinking behind the great code.