Week 1: The Thrill Of The Hunt

We're already at the end of the first week - hard to believe! Well for what it's worth, I think it's been a good week. I've spent a lot less time writing test cases than I thought I would, and that's because I spent a lot more time actually chasing real bugs in the Mojo codebase.

Some people don't like to debug code. In fact, I'd venture that most coders wouldn't rank that activity too highly. But I actually really like it! And I think I'm pretty good at it. I enjoy spelunking through code trying to figure out what makes it tick and also trying to throw odd things at a piece of code to see how it reacts. This week, I committed the following fixes to Mojo:

• problem with 5-second delay on multiple request pipeline;

• support HEAD requests on server-side;

• chunked request parsing needs to add a Content-Length header;

• problem on chunked request with trailing headers.

Discussions about the HTTP spec with Sebastian Riedel over IRC also prompted him to make a few commits having to do with the Transfer-Encoding header and to perform some clean-up in Mojo::Transaction and Mojo::Pipeline. See my Github network graph for all the gory details if you want.

One thing I've found is that, of course, since I am debugging a codebase I am just getting familiar with, I am much slower than someone like Sebastian or my mentor Viacheslav Tikhanovskii. What this implies is that when I find a bug, I'm better off not telling them about it over IRC right away, because then they pounce all over it and I don't get the learning experience that chasing it down would have given me... :) I'm still learning my way around git, github and the Perl debugger, but all in all things are coming along nicely. Anyway, I feel I'm already having a positive impact on the project, if I may say so myself. And I'm having fun!