I think my very favorite aspect of the open source development model is that it allows me to practice the philosophies I use in my every day personal life, and apply them to software development as well. In my teens and early 20’s I read quite a lot of Aristotle and Plato, and a very major philosophy that I took away from all of that reading is “be conscious of your own ignorance”. And so I am.
There are just about a million reasons to start an open source project. In the case of loghetti, I made it a project because I know that there are things that other people know, which I do not know, but would probably like to know or benefit from knowing (we’ll not go into epistemological discussions – I’m just going to use the word “know” in the traditional sense here) 😉
Turns out, just knowing that there’s stuff out there that I don’t know has proven useful. Within hours of launching the Google Code site for the project, Kent Johnson joined the project, changed maybe 5 lines of code in the apachelogs.py module, and according to my testing, that change resulted in a 6x speed increase. If you’re using loghetti from the SVN trunk, it’s gone from being sluggish for anything over 50MB, to being pretty darn quick even up to 250MB, at least for simple queries like –code=404 (which is what I do speed comparisons with). The changes will be in a tarball probably some time next week, for those who don’t want to use svn.
We haven’t even touched threading yet 😉