Out of the way

I got very frustrated, many years ago, with the state of the art in calendars. Somehow, I still am. Most of the things they didn't do then, they still don't do, and most of the things that would make a calendar cool are things like that.

So a few days ago I started playing around with some javascript, trying to figure out how you might parse iCalendar information. It's a spare time project - I have a proper job, so I am doing it for my own amusement and edification. And since I want to learn, that means I am taking on something very big that I don't really expect to finish - but from which I expect to learn plenty and understand lots of things better.

So, in the unlikely event that I produce something (rather than hand over some half-done code to someone who is 100 times as efficient as I, along with a spec), I will of course publish it. In the meantime what I have is various fragments that break up a record in various incomplete ways, and leave horrible debugging artifacts behind. The scoping is horrendous, the refactoring is generally buggy and unreliable, the UI is almost non-existent, the design is mostly hand-waving, and the idea is to boil the ocean.

But I am learning something, even if I am sitting up very late at night to do so. It is funny, programming is like learning a language - when I first return to it I have retained nothing (I was never a javascript programmer) but after a little while things start to flow, more nicely than they ever did. Although there is literally nothing worth showing (35 boxes grey boxes anyone? Drop a record in a box and have it say "there are 45 events and 37 other things happened?) yet, it is keeping me entertained.

And it saved you all from another book review...

...for a while, at least