When I’m not busy coding in various dialects of C for Fog Creek, I enjoy coding in Squeak Smalltalk as a hobby, and I try to stay active in the community when I can. Unfortunately, lately, I’ve been slacking rather spectacularly, and perhaps because of that I missed that Göran had assembled a nice tutorial on how to build a Squeak VM for Linux/Unix. The tutorial should get you a fresh-built VM in a couple of minutes, and a custom-built one not too long after that. Do note that, if you’re on OS X, you’ll want to do

configure --with-quartz --without-x

before you make, or it won’t build properly.

Update: Göran updated the tutorial to contain the Macintosh instructions, so you can now just go straight there.

After a semester of virtually no coding, I’m preparing to return to New York to do more work for Fog Creek on Fog Creek Copilot. This will be the first time in my career that I’m returning to a code base that I haven’t seen in a bit over a year.

In some ways, this is very exciting. Knowing that something I put so much time and effort into has proven to be truly useful to a large number of people is extraordinarily gratifying, and getting a fresh chance to fix all the little things that I ran out of time to fix will be wonderfully cathartic (and make Copilot an even better product than it is now).

In other ways, though, I’ve rarely had more trepidation about an assignment. The parts of Copilot adapted from TightVNC are disjoint and not well written, and a lot of the knowledge I picked up last year about how the code actually works has probably leaked out of my brain. A lot of that we documented; some of it, we did not. I’m going to be very interested to see exactly how quickly I can return to being productive when working with the Copilot code base. I have no doubt that I’ll have no problem adding the features we want to add; I just feel equally sure that I’ll have at least a small ramp-up period as I get re-acclimated.

Update: I forgot to mention, but the end-user components of Fog Creek Copilot are open-source. You can download the current version by following the links from the FAQ page.