Good Old Times

Andrei and Zak recently posted their "Good Old Times" references to getting into the PHP project so I thought I'd put mine forward for good measure. Never let it be said I'm not a follower...

At any rate, it didn't take long for Derick to suggest I refer to the CODING_STANDARDS and resubmit the patch as a unified diff against HEAD. After resubmitting, the patch was accepted and, bouyed by my response, led to another contribution in the form of the getanyrr() function which would later come to be named dns_get_record().

Three and a half years later and I've managed to touch nearly every part of the PHP Core distribution and make a lot of friends (and perhaps some not-so-friendlies) along the way. Cheers to all, you know who you are.

You're not bad...for a girl...

In response to http://news.php.net/php.internals/21374 I offered up a fairly simple extension dubbed "callable" (note, I never wound up dropping this in PECL) which overrides the builtin is_callable() function to call $object->__callable($methodname) in order to determine if a __call() overloaded object is actually capable of calling a particular method.

Those who wanted the funcitonality were happy to have the code and it brought the already-too-long discussion to a close saving list traffic for more important topics.

That same day, one of the list lurkers sent me an email which included the following.....quizzical paragraph:

Not to sound chauvinistic or anything and not meant to be, but you are a woman, I'm very impressed with the code, it's direct and too the point, not what I would expect from someone of your gender as most female programmers I've come across are into a lot of fluff and eye-candy and not so much in pure functionality.

Now, I'm about 95% certain that he did, in fact mean it as a compliment. And while I appreciate the....hrmmm praise isn't quite the right word...good wishes, I'm not really really clear on just how appreciative I should be. It's a little like what I would expect hearing "You're remarkably well spoken for a black person*." would be like... Or something.... How do you successfully answer a comment like that? Is it even possible?

*Not the cliche'd expression, but my liberal-guilt won't let me use it, even as an example of poor taste.