PGWest Slides, Back to Work

Well, back to work a bit, anyway. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., so I’m not likely to do much more until next week. But I’ll be heads down on it, then, working to get the search site done.

Before I talk about that, though, I realize that I forgot to post the link to my slides from PGWest. I actually posted them before the talk, I just never got round to mentioning it here. So, here it is:

I’m pretty happy with how it came out. The organizers shot video of it, too; I’ll post a link or embed when it drops.

Meanwhile, I have returned to work on the search site design. How do you like it? The pages I’ve completed the design for are:

• Search/Home Page
• Search Results
• Extension documentation
• Distribution information
• Owner information

Imagine if all open-source PostgreSQL extensions were posted on this site. You could search through them all, including their documentation, browse their docs, find related extensions, and see what else the extension owner has worked on. All in one place, without downloading anything. That’s the plan for this site. Notice anything missing you think should be there? Let me know.

So I’m going to start work on the app to create this now, but before I do, I wanted to point out the PGXN project wish list wiki. Folks have been having all sorts of ideas for features that would be great for PGXN, and I don’t want to lose track of them. So if you’ve had any ideas at all, no matter how big or small, please feel free to add them to the wiki. As the project progresses, some I might be able to just build in, but others I might want to see go onto a project road map. What do you want to see on the road map?

Oh, and if you want to see your extensions on this site, please do register a PGXN Manager account. Once your account is approved (and we’re pretty quick to do so), have a look at the how to and release your extensions on PGXN today!

I’ve been working on my PostgreSQL Conference West presentation, which heavily features PGXN, of course. I think it’s looking good. If you’re at PGWest or are in the San Francisco area and free, come see the talk! Should be a good introduction to creating PostgreSQL extensions and distributing them on PGXN. The latest bit I added is a section on the modifications needed to support the forthcoming CREATE EXTENSION support slated for 9.1. Fortunately it’s dead simple, and will make dealing with extensions in the database a lot simpler, administratively. Really looking forward to that. Of course I’ll post slides once the talk is over.

As part of preparing for the talk, and because there isn’t currently much to actually see of PGXN, I’ve been mocking up the layout for the new search site, which as you know from the status page is the next part of the project I’m slated to work on. I’ve been committing the mockps to the gh-pages branch of the repository, which means you can see what it looks like live on the net right here. That’s the home page, including our sponsor links and tag cloud. Click the “PGXN Search” button to see a mockup of search results (or get them here). Click on any search result to see the mockup of a documentation page (or link it here). The design is based on the lazydays open-source Web design, and I’m quite happy with it. Your thoughts?

As this comes together, I’m gearing up to start hacking on the app to produce the search site. At this point, I’m thinking that it would become the new home page for PGXN, rather than a separate search.pgxn.org site. Thoughts?

I’ll post the slides tomorrow.

Yesterday was a busy day. In addition to making the first PGXN release, I updated the fundraising spreadsheet and then the thermometer displayed on the main site. The good news is that things are coming along nicely. Thanks to recent contributions from Command Prompt, Marchex, Hitoshi Harada, and 25th-floor, we are now just $2500 short of our goal of $25,000. Thank you all!

Can you help us get to our goal in time for PgWest 2010, which is November 2-4 in San Francisco? I’ll be giving a talk there, “Building and Distributing PostgreSQL Extensions Without Learning C”, in which PGXN will of course be featured. Would be great to announce that the fundraising was successful.

As for the time I’ve put in so far, I’m happy to have PGXN Manager up and working, but of course it has taken more hours than I expected. 76.5 so far. I’d estimated 40. Meanwhile, the database design is up to 43 hours from the estimated 24. And that doesn’t count the hours I spent chasing shiny yaks and shaving them, like SemVer and Router::Resource. Those of you who estimate development projects, take heed! I clearly need to double all my estimates before I submit them.

Still, with the fundraising nearly done, I’m committed to finishing this project. I view it as a project budget, and so that’s what it will be, whether or not it takes me twice or four times as many hours as I’d estimated.

That said, you could help. Right? PGXN Manager is in good shape, but it’s not done. If you’d like to roll up your sleeves and contribute some code, please fork it, build it, and hack what you can. A few things on the to-do list:

• Add user admin interface. Should include checkbox to make and remove administrative permission
• Add mirror admin interface
• Add extension ownership permissions interface

The database API is there for these bits already; the code would mainly be in Perl. Hit me on #pgxn on Freenode if you want to help.

If documentation is your thing, contributions there would be appreciated, as well. In particular, the About PGXN page is a bit thin. Other interfaces will need help, too. More on that as we add users.

Thanks everyone for your support!