One project down, another to begin

In my experience, software programs are never finished.  You can always add a new feature, optimize some back end code, or integrate it into another workflow.  The reason why we stop working on a program is either boredom, someone deems it good enough, or the bosses want you to work on something else that they is more important.

Nevertheless, almost all projects come to some end.  Today, one of my projects came to an end.  Well, it's more like we've reached a milestone that we targeted a few months ago.  After a lot of hard work and a few late nights, we actually finished just about everything we set out to do, hooray!

In the coming days, we'll be planning the next things we'd like to work on.  I have some opinions on what would be the best features to work on, but it will be something that a few people will discuss and come to some consensus about.  In the end, the features we decide to work on will not affect my day to day life.

As a new project is being planned, the most important bit is estimating how long the project will take.  If I underestimate how much time I will need, it will put pressure on me to finish code faster and may lead to buggier code.  So this time around, I will do my best to give myself ample time.  I will do my best to not work overtime (aka, I will not work for free).

Google app engine python search tutorial

After completing an introductory tutorial for Google App Engine using python,  I was able to create the first version of an app engine project, englishtokoreanforum.appspot.com.  I modified and extended the tutorial a bit to set up a few other handlers and data types.

I then went on to the next Google App Engine tutorial, which would teach me how to set up searching over an index that I set up for this app.  Unfortunately, when I first tried it, the application in the tutorial would run, because of this issue.  (It has since been fixed after I upgraded to the next version of the GoogleAppEngineLauncher).  

Along with setting up the search index and functionality, this tutorial is nice because it isn't as trivial as the first tutorial.  It shows how someone might want to organize all the files that might go into a real project.  The different files types in this tutorial are *.html, *.py, *.yaml, *js, *css. It shows how to separate data files, test files and the main application.  This is invaluable for a beginner, and something that isn't often emphasized.