Splitcells Network Blog

Reprioritization At least to oneself, everybody should admit ones mistakes. So, basically I’m coming to the realization, that the implementation of the school course scheduling optimization takes too much time. The first time in university, when I implemented it, I had some initial performance problems, but they were not that hard to solve. At that time, I got that and a lot more working in less than a year.

Current GUI Situation The view breaks my heart. The accessibility of this project aka the GUI was not that important until now. Mainly, because there were not enough features present to justify the effort and because there are no potential users for the software right now. There is already a web server in order to render the documentation and some simple reports, but until now it was not a main concern, as interactive features are lacking.

Migrating The Webserver It’s temporary. We’ll make it nice later… Well, that was a lie. The website server is the most often migrated piece of the project’s software. It started with Jekyll, which was abandoned in favor of an XML/XSL based static website renderer, because it’s easier to generate arbitrary output formats, when one has full control of the input format and can therefore limit it as much as possible.

Sometimes one has to learn by pain. There is a known advice for new bloggers, that recommends to use existing web layouts, because making one from the start is a very time-consuming effort. As one can expect, this was exactly, what I did not do for splitcells.net. I could not find a satisfying web layout, because I was too ***** to google good ones. Another problem was the fact, that I did not know what type of content would need to be supported by the layout.

Original Plan For The Next Version Initially it was planned to solve all school problems for the next version: The Oral Exam Problem (solved) The School Course Scheduling Problem The Sport Lesson Assignment Unfortunately, this seemed to be a too big task for the next version. Other than the oral exam management problem the school scheduling problem consists of multiple subproblems, which depend on each other. This on itself is not an issue, but when attempting to tackle this challenge many small imperfections surfaced.

An Advantage Of SVN Over Git Git is a good version control system for one repository, but it seems to lack a protocol for managing multiple repos. So, a week ago, I talked to a friend about one of SVN’s big advantages over Git: the ability to add sub repositories without the need for an additional repo and software. Git has the submodule feature, which works somewhat similar, but has one main difference: a submodule is basically a link inside git to a commit of another git repo.

Previous Situation The best software is the one, that does not need to be written. The best way to accommodate this, is to make written software replaceable and abandonable. I created my own website server/static generator, because I wanted to create the counterpart to dependency injection, that is used in order to isolate projects from each other. The idea was to create a dependency merging process, that is used in order to create a unified documentation for a set of projects, which may be isolated from each other.

Development Timing And Discovery Based Networks Of Perspectives (Den) One has always more ideas or needs, than time needed to implement or satisfy such. discovery based networks of perspectives or short Den are such an example. It’s basically a concept for an abstract syntax tree (AST) and related semantics and paradigms. I have spent quite a time formalising and working with them, but other than one would expect, there is actually not much written down regarding this topic.

There is the bad, there is the horrible, and then there is error handling. I’m sorry dear reader, but I am emotionally triggered 🙇🏽‍♂️ Maybe this whole article is gibberish and maybe it is not 🤷 I’m truly sorry for the ranty article, but I need an outlet. Hopefully, I will not regret this piece. Every time I think of error handling the following comes to mind: NO GOD! PLEASE NO!

I am not a lawyer: This is no legal advice, the following only represents some of my opinions and understandings. Make sure to consult someone, who knows what they’re talking about. Don’t take this article too seriously, you probably have better ways to waste your time. 🍺 This just summarizes the key distinction between the Apache 2.0 and the EPL 2.0 from my point of view, because both were considered as a license for this project.