Someone mentioned today on digg that it was relatively easy to find thousands of developer email addresses by searching for a suitable regexp on Google Code Search. Since I was already bored (hey, I was reading digg, it couldn't have been too busy a day) I decided to search for myself and see what should pop up.

The first couple of pages were unsuprising, mostly links to my modules on CPAN, but then I stumbled across something interesting. In a little program I had never heard of was a copy of Geo::ShapeFile. The fact that they were distributing my module along with their program isn't a big deal, it's licensed under the Artistic license, and they credited me and everything else, what caught my eye about it was this comment in the LICENSE file:

The version of Geo::Shapfile in this distribution includes fixes for machines of different endianness, not yet available on CPAN.

I downloaded the source and perused it a bit and discovered that the author was even kind enough to include RCS files for the libraries that had been modified, which made it very easy to figure out what local changes he had made, and to find that indeed there were fixes for some endian-related issues in the module which have vexed me for quite a while (sadly my current job does not involve mapping, so I don't have as much time to put into this module as I would like). The most interesting part was that the solution he used seems to be better than my own solution had been, and appears to have been written before the problem was first reported to me.

So, have you checked Google to see what people might have neglected to contribute to your projects?

Along the way I also found some other interesting tidbits that I hadn't known...

• That I'm mentioned in Jifty::DBI
• a project I vaguely remember hearing something about long ago, that lists me as a contributor
• a project I don't think I've ever heard of that lists me in their Changes file
• One of my very first contributions to an open source project

And last (and certainly least) a reminder that I was even more of a geek in college

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