A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Look at all the unfinished LJ posts I have here. Oh wait you can't. Um...

Hey! Various things have been conspiring to make me feel loserly lately. For the most part it doesn't work, because I am oblivious, but I do admit to letting myself get pretty stressed out over something unexpected that happened with the Google checkout stuff. My friends, I got scooped. In the best possible way, and with plenty of silver lining, yes. But a scoop is a scoop, still.

Long story short, a Google employee who was working on the same problem saw my stub site of SourceForge and got in touch, letting me have a butcher's at his own code. Yes, it's more feature-complete than mine. In fact, it's more or less all there. After a couple of days of resistance, throughout which daerr talked sane at me, I've decided to embrace this other fellow's solution. In fact I just now sent him a lengthy letter with a laundry list of some issues I had with it - mostly superficial stuff about Perl/CPAN style, with which he's clearly unfamiliar - and attached a snapshot of all the code and tests I'd written as of Monday night. He sez he'll be happy to give me credit, which is great, but I bend the knee just the same.

If it was some random individual, I very well may have pressed forward with my own solution. But this is going to be Google's Own Blessed Version, so there doesn't seem to be much point in competing. Beyond that, I think they'll do a better job (or at least care more about) maintaining it that I ever would with my module. I appreciate the opportunity to apply my Perl expertise to work with and even coach another smart programmer - in a way, it's like my project blew up into full-blown open-sourciness sooner than I expected.

And, hey, it never hurts to be on good terms with more people inside Google.

But it's still the first time I really got shown up like this with a project, and there is an owie involved.