As midterm reviews approach I've been working on cleaning up any and all messy hacks so I can have a nice presentation. Last week I started using the Makefile.am instead of bash scripts. This week I tried cleaning it up further so that libmemcached is compiled automatically as needed instead of as a pre-installed dependency. Now any developer can download and compile my modifications without having to jump through hoops.

I'm beginning to feel as though the build tools are more difficult to edit than the code itself.
After numerous 'unable to find header' errors I think I have finally fixed every INCLUDE declaration necessary. I think this has put me a bit behind for the midterm review and caused a bit of stress, but I think this will save me a great deal of time overall.

Had my first segfault while working on the project last week, it was a pain to track down without a debugger. The Eclipse debugger doesn't play nicely with MySQL on my machine at the moment. I've been poking around with Netbeans as well though I haven't tried debugging with it yet.

I am still shooting for being able to cache and hit by next week.
That is my goal for a "Hello World" of sorts.

The one question that worries me on the review sheet is along the lines of "have they earned $2,000?". I have a great deal of difficulty associating time and code with money. I've been coding since middle school... I code in my spare time, I code for fun, I code at work, but coding and money aren't linear in my mind. If you based it just on hours spent, I don't think I've put in 200 hours into this project yet, though I am getting close.

I worry too much, back to coding!

Alright! Thanks to my mentor Brian I now have a semi-clean build procedure in place.
I just type 'make' and it compiles both libmemcached and mysql together nicely.

The previous setup was rather hackish and involved some bash scripts I'm not proud of, but it worked. I suppose since Google sent me a book on how to write Beautiful Code, I should really be writing code accordingly.

Just two weeks until 'midterm review' ... *panics*
I feel like I am making good progress despite my lack of time.
I'd really like to have something functional in the next two weeks, bugs are inevitable.
My mentor said that it was important to find my "Hello World!" as he put it when working on this project. I'm not sure how to define that though, it compiles, it runs, it connects to memcached, but is that Hello World worthy enough or am I worrying too much?

I'm going to stick to my goal of trying to have it at least try to cache and hit before the review, but I will likely fall short.

I should blog more, the weekly updates are nice, but a more frequent update cycle would help to keep me on track.

Happy coding!

I'm finally starting to feel at home with my build environment.
I have my timeline, I have my tools, and I have motivation.
I've gotten Eclipse/CDT working just right, I'm making small iterative improvements, compiling, debugging, and then repeating.

It doesn't quite feel like a Monday, I worked from home today, and had a nice long talk with a friend of mine this evening. Everything seems to at ease for a Monday. I only hope they'll forgive me for turning in my report a few hours late ... again.

The code:
-Compiles!
-Runs!
-Doesn't cache or hit.

But there is definite progress, the framework is all laid out, now I just need to fill in the methods and tie in memcache. I should have working software ready for midterm review, and even better software for the final review. It would be nice to see this code in production someday.

I attended the Boston MySQL meetup today and it was wonderful.
(Thanks to Sheeri Cabral for the invite)
Food, beverages, and swag were provided for free and the presentation was great.
The talk went into great detail about database backups and was one of the most practical talks I have attended.

Coding is going well, just wish I had more time to do so.

I think I might actually submit a report on time today!

I've accomplished quite a bit in the last week.
On top of my day job, I cleaned out my basement, fixed my car, and got Xen working on my server.

As for the project, I feel I have a solid understanding of how the current cache works and exactly what needs to go into the interface. I'm a bit worried about the invalidate_by_MyISAM_filename stuff because I'm not familiar with the storage engine code, but everything else appears to be smooth sailing.

I've solved the interface problem I was researching: by avoiding it completely.
An interface in comments alone is sufficient at the moment with only two cache backends, a simple #define can switch them at compile time without any performance hit. This can fairly easily be improved upon by future developers so long as I document appropriately.

I've got a skeleton Query_memcache class going with all the necessary methods defined and commented with what needs to be done. Since not everyone will be wanting to compile in memcache with MySQL I'm thinking of expanding of the existing Query_cache #define's to integrate the memcache stuff in. I've looked into how to write a plug-in but I'm hesitant to go that route yet, if I can refactor working code at the end of the project without breaking anything then I might submit it as a plug-in as well.

I still need to figure out exactly how MySQL starts up and initializes everything so I can add in a few things to init my code. The tools cat, grep, and less only get one so far...

4 weeks till midterm evaluations and I feel worlds better after this week.
I really feel like I'll make it now.

My short term goal is to have working code that compiles cleanly, connects to a memcached server, and can cache things without breaking anything.
Further goals are more robust code, quality tests, better performance, complete documentation.
Lofty goals would be to refactor it into a plug-in, caching across multiple servers, and make fries.

Estimates:
2 week - code connected in and tested, caches but never hits.
4 weeks - caches, hits, working list of bugs
6 weeks - iron out most bugs, clean things up
I'll try and rework these estimates as time goes on.

The weather here in New England is currently hot and muggy, not the best of weather for coding, but a cold beverage and a comfy chair in the basement makes up for it.

Still haven't heard back from my mentor but I've been forging ahead. I know how busy things can get.

I've been working on interfacing out the caching system and attempting to refactor existing code.
I want to keep things fast and efficient, but simple enough that the interface applies to any caching system. I've been trying to use Eclipse and the CDT plugin to trace where the Query cache is called and how it is currently used.

For any caching solution there are a few basic methods:
-init() //gets things started
-resize() //resizes the cache to a specified size

-store() //stores an entry in the cache
-retrieve() //retrieves an entry from the cache

-invalidate() //invalidates all entries that match certain parameters
-flush() //flush the whole cache

It would be nice to refactor the interface down to just these few methods but the way things look at the moment it may not be that simple...

As wonderful and useful as Eclipse is with Java, the CDT plugin has a long way to go in terms of stability and features. It hurts almost as much as it helps! *crash*

Reports are due Monday and I really need to put in more time to have something to show.