I think you could call what I did for the last three days a binge of sorts. A colleague and I have started to use campfire in an effort to log communications and keep a steady flow of information going between our now hectic (love you family) and un-sync'd work efforts. Given my strong love for desktop clients, or real apps as I like to call them, I naturally went out searching for a linux client.
My searching didn't take long and I landed what was and will be my upcoming addiction called, Snakefire! Every time I see that name i think of the saturday night live skit about riding the snake with will farrel! Anyway this fancy little app was written by a cool gent named Mariano (http://marianoiglesias.com.ar/). He did some very nice work, although it's in QT at least it's python! I'll just wait until the GTK rewrite :)
So after using the application for a little while, I noticed a few things weren't working and also some missing features, or at least i thought they might be features. Given the code base in good shape, it being on Github, and it being python i thought what the hell... let's do it rather than ask for it. After about an hour, which was mostly spent understanding QT and how it works, i whipped up the ability to hide the join and part messages (ANNOYING!). I worked up my pull request and shipped it off to the master repo. As soon as that was done, I began checking my pull request every 15 minutes.
I was like a little boy on christmas day who sent his letter off to santa and kept waking up christmas eve to see if his request was delivered. Needless to say we were on different time schedules and my 15 minute check up went without a response for awhile but i pressed on, checking immediately as I woke up Monday morning.
It was accepted! HOLY SHIT! I got something into an app and I loved it! It was such a rush of accomplishment i could barely contain my excitement. It was from that moment that I became addicted. This same process occurred later that evening when I fixed the alerting system for gnome/xcfe setups and added inactive notification options. Another pull request was submitted and Github was forced to reset every 15 minutes in anticipation of acceptance.
Again I went to bed and woke up to find it accepted again! Man two of em were taken, i was totally making this product better. Obviously i couldn't stop, and i couldn't just add small features in... i wanted something challenging. So what did i begin working on that Tueday? I re-worked the display panel to be a web view so that images would be inline, hooked up drag and drop image uploading and even auto scrolling. I also paved the way to allow us to style up the conversation window to make it purtty. Like I said, Hooked!
So am I done? Hell no, this is great and Mariano is a great remote development work buddy so we aren't going to stop now. We have a lot in store for this little app and I couldn't be any happier to be apart of it. Keep and eye on it, test it, or add some sweet features to it cause it really feels excellent to give back. https://github.com/mariano/snakefire
