I went to the first ever ORD session last night sponsored by Inventables and Google Chicago and worked on some metric_fu stuff. The idea of the ORD sessions is that there’s a lot of open source developers in the Chicago (ORD is the O’Hare airport code) area so why not get them together to hack on some stuff. I’d say over 20 people showed up and had a great time. It didn’t hurt that every one who came got an unlocked google phone as a free surprise gift. When they announced, earlier in the evening, that there would be a surprise we all thought: “Oh cool, I’ll probably get a t-shirt or a squishy ball.” So the phone sort of blew us away.

As to metric_fu, Jeff from Inventables and I paired on a new meta metric called “Flurn.” It’s a combination of FLog and chURN and it tells you about files that not only are very complex but also change all the time. This is pretty bad because if the file is in constant flux and it’s got a lot of convoluted code then that’s a bunch of bugs waiting to happen.

“Flurn” is available through the appropriately named ‘flurn’ branch of metric_fu on github if you want to check it out before it’s released in a future version of metric_fu.

Speaking of future versions of metric_fu, there should be one coming out soon with ‘awesome’ templates and graphs of metrics over time. Stay tuned.