Sprint Day #2

Another productive day at the Toronto Code Sprint! Today was “sprint forward” day, so everyone got an hour less sleep than they expected, but by 10am everyone was back in the room, coding hard.

I’m proud to have closed two bugs [1] [2] today (both of the “one hour of study per one line of altered code” sort), moving towards our PostGIS goal of releasing what Mark Cave-Ayland has been eloquently calling a 1.4 “beater” for the PostGIS community to test prior to cutting an official numbered 1.4 release candidate. I think we’ll have all the critical bugs closed before the end of the week and have that beater out on the road, mowing down pedestrians, before the week is out.

Towards the end of the afternoon, I fired up the Shark and provided some profiling information for the Mapserver team, and talked about some profiles that Julien from MapGears had generated earlier. Julien is going to enhance some work I did last year on large shape files, to make traversing the shape file selection set even faster (the larger the shape file, the higher the benefit, but by traversing the selection set with 4-byte (int) pointer instead of a 1-byte (char) pointer he should be able to extract some good gains).

Steve Lime continues to contemplate the problem of improving the MapServer query work flow, to make WFS and large query performance on database back-ends faster. It sounds like we are rapidly converging on an answer, so hopefully tomorrow is the day we do an implementation and tie some back-ends into the solution.

At 6:30, we all trouped to the Baton Rouge for dinner, which was excellent. Thanks to Coordinate Solutions and SJ Geophysics for supporting today’s activities!