Collaboration
This is a pretty late newsletter by my standards, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was dragging my feet on writing this.
There’s no reason for that other than the general laziness I feel right now. Last week was pretty eventful. Tim from JetBrains Slacked me early in the week to let me know that a developer was interested in collaborating with me on my project. This came as a massive surprise, as I didn’t think I really did a good job of explaining and “marketing” my project to him or some of the other folks at JetBrains that I had the chance to speak to.
I’d say that this is pretty good news; Oleg (my new collaborator) also let me know that my reachability analysis extension can likely be implemented as a plugin, and won’t require me to actually modify the open-source edition of IntelliJ. On one hand, this is great news, since it means my feature won’t be limited to a specific build of IntelliJ/can be a standalone plugin that folks can just install on their IDEs. On the other hand, it means that some of the hacks that I’ve employed (like dropping in my code directly in the internal IntelliJ libraries) won’t fly. My main concern is that the plugin API will be too limiting for some of the things I want my tool to do.
Oh, well. That’s a problem for next-week-James.
That reminds me, next week is Reading Week. I didn’t really plan anything to do, and I was pretty much going to consider it a normal work week… but something tells me that I should probably take some time to recharge. We’ll see if that actually happens.
In terms of thesis-writing, here’s how it’s looking so far (sections aren’t exactly numbered):
- 1: Intro ✅
- 2: Related Work 🟠
- 2.1: Reachability Questions
- 2.3: Low-level Support for Reachability Questions
- 2.2: Answering Reachability Questions
- 2.3: How Developers Use Tools
- 2.3.1: Tool Usability and Discovery (I want to add this)
- 3: Survey ✅
- 4: Tool Implementation 🟠
- 5: Study ❌
- 6: Discussion + Future Work ❌
I sent Gail my section on Related Work, and surprisingly enough, she seems to enjoy it (with minor edits, of course). I was surprised, because I gave myself the impression that I really had no idea what the hell what I was talking about.
Next week, I plan to work a bit more on tool usability and discovery, since I think they’re incredibly important topics for software tooling. I can’t leave that section out.
Have a great reading week!