Back in the Saddle

My next 30 day challenge hasn't gone so well.  It turns out that sometimes it's easier to commit to something larger and execute on it than commit to something smaller that's easily forgotten.  Oh well, I guess I'll just hit the reset button and try something else.

In the meantime, I found out from a friend who uses my spoofer extension that it completely stopped working with Chrome 35 (dev channel).  This usually happens when Chrome changes APIs that extensions can use to do certain things, and indeed, this is what happened.  Looking through all of the chrome.* APIs I was calling, half of them were deprecated and replaced with something else.  So much for a stable development platform.

So this pushed me a bit on releasing my half-baked 1.0.30 version, that was a significant rewrite from 1.0.26.  Thanks to some very cool and helpful G+ commenters, I isolated a couple of bugs in the 1.0.30 version and knew I needed to get back on the horse and start hacking again.

But, there were several problems:  One, all of my source code was on a 5-year-old laptop that is one power supply away from being a doorstop.  Second, none of the source code is under source control.  And last, I had no error reporting in the extension at all -- it could be failing horribly and I would never know.  I set out to change that and learn new stuff along the way.

First, I set up a bitbucket account, where I could have multiple projects for free.  Usually for open-source stuff, people pick github, but I went otherwise because of (a) all of that weird BS going on around github in general, and (b) bitbucket is free.  I also started using git, and tracking / tagging / etc. the source, so that's good.  Second, I polished off an old CodeEnvy account I had and started and connected it to my bitbucket repos and started hacking online (on my Chromebook, naturally)

CodeEnvy has been surprisingly responsive and usable.  I can deploy an app engine app right from the IDE, push and pull from bitbucket, and can edit multiple languages.  I'm impressed with it so far....I daresay it might be something I'd pay for.

Lastly, I started fixing up the bugs in 1.0.30 and implemented a weak (but workable) error reporting system.  It's anonymous, and just reports how often an error occurs.  I don't have it sending anything back yet, but it's a good start.

Also, I think I made a decision on upgrading my workstation to a Macbook Pro 15".  Now, if I can just get the guts to spend $1900 on it...