Public Projects, Finishing Things, and bitbucket
I’ve been writing Python fairly steadily for the past couple of years, and a significant amount of that has been for my own projects; Python is what I tend to use to scratch workflow-related itches. That’s great, but many of these projects reach a point short of “finished” when I stop working on them.
This is because I generally stop when they’re good enough for me to use. Which is fine, except that they hang around mentally, because I don’t feel that they’re fully done. So I’m going to make an effort to formally finish them by making them public, and pushing them to bitbucket.org. Making them public by posting them on my blog is fine, but feels much more like just pasting code into a blog post—which is what it is. Making them available to others in a convenient way is a better approach, and also forces me to get them to the point where I can call them done and feel good about it.
I selected my sorted Subversion status script for this, because it was fairly small but might conceivably be useful to others (I found the concept useful enough to write it, after all). I cleaned up it, which made it faster and better, and wrote a quick README for it, and put it on bitbucket.
I hope to do the same with other almost-finished scripts I have lying around.