I’ve worked on FOSS for years. Currently I have two active projects pyxser and caffeine. Both of them requires a great effort to being completed. Take an overview on their development:

Dear pyxser users, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve released pyxser-1.4.2r. The current ChangeLog for this release is as follows:

1.4.2r (2010.02.10):

        Daniel Molina Wegener <dmw at coder dot cl>
        * pyxser_collections.c: Added constraint checks for NULL
        pointers removing nested statements.
        * pyxser.c: Removed nested statements.
        * pyxser_tools.c: Added constratints checks for NULL pointers,
        removed nested statements and added strict checking for lists
        since it was crashing with an ambigous list definition that
        can not be handled by PyList_Check().
        * test-utf8.py: Added tests to determine if it continue
        crashing with module serialization.

        Thanks to pyxser users for their feedback.

One of my most recent projects is a Meta-Parser. The core requirement is to write a dynamic parser, which can be configured, allowing the user to setup certain patterns around the given input and extract those pattern tokens to being exposed to other layers of the main project. Surely this is a challenge, and interesting part of the global project. I’ve finished to work on this part of the project, it is implemented in C++ as the client requires it, and I’ve made a simple model based on the PAC architectural pattern.

I don’t use recipes to ensure the quality of my software. Most of those development tasks to make the software a reliable tool are techniques learned along the time, without considering the methodology behind the software development. I can’t stand for any methodology as the better methodology that you can use. I just follow few commandments or rules on software development, and all of them bring me good results.

"…premature optimization is the root of all evil".
— Donald Knuth

I agree with the fact that we must do our source code level optimizations when we have finshed the construction stage or it is almost complete. I was searching articles and papers about optimizing C source code to be applied on my programs and libraries. I’ve collected some of those optimizations. But you must not confuse algorithm optimization, source code optimization and compiler optimization, since the first one refers to algorithm design and the second one just refers to the algorithm implementation, and both are sharing just few common approaches to formal reductions.

As you have seen in my last post, I’ve been working on some strong changes on pyxser. Today I’ve released pyxser-1.4r and the announcement message:

pyxser, my Python-Object to XML serializer is suffering few changes, but important ones. The main change is the fact that I will add a type map optional parameter for deserialization functions. How should it work?