phil 1.0 released!

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

Mediagoblin has monthly project meetings. One of the things I wanted to automate was meeting reminders that gets sent x days in advance, contain the link to the Meetings page in the wiki, and specify the date and time of the next meeting. I figure if we automate it, it's one less thing we have to think about---it just happens.

To do this, I decided to write phil. For the most part, it's sort of a throw-away project, but it was so small that I decided to go through a complete project development cycle with it and make sure it had all the bits a mature Python project should have: proper packaging, license, configuration, tests, project infrastructure, ...

I think it took about 10 hours over the course of 2 weeks. I was learning the icalendar library and python-dateutil and also figuring out exactly what I wanted it to do as I went along. For a small project like this, that's fine. For a larger project, I'd prefer to spend more time researching and designing ahead of time.

It was nice to "take a vacation" and put all the other projects I normally work on on hold to throw something together from scratch.

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