Humps - education and integration

After an initial "where on earth do we start?" period we are proceeding very rapidly. Although it's important to keep up with what everybody in the group is doing, deciding to specialize has really helped us move forward by reducing the education burden. I'm handling the location-setting part of the facebook application and the back-end, so I have been able to focus pretty much entirely on learning php and mysql. I'm actually really excited about that, because I've been "learning" php for about a year and a half now, as in I have had a nice thick book on my bookshelf for a year and a half and have gone through the first 2 chapters about 5 different times. But now after just a couple of long nights trying things and misplacing semicolongs, I'm confident enough to hack around with the framework that I have up there already, and spend more time looking at the text editor than at google or the php book. Mysql had no hump to speak of - it's incredibly simple to write the queries, and since it comes with a very nice GUI it's a snap to update or change the structure when we decide we need to.

Now that the education hump is over we still have the integration hump to deal with. Kristine and I have been working separately on the two halves of the facebook/server side of the application in separate files just running on our own server; bringing our work together and putting it on facebook has been a tricky process and it seems like maybe we should have started that a little bit earlier. There are an assortment of niggly little things to deal with; for example, on my own server the action of the form transfers variables to another php page very easily, but on facebook it doesn't like leaving the callback URL so I need to figure out how to get multiple pages up or have the form be self-referential. However, the collaborative aspect of programming is very interesting - working side by side on computers and being able to instantly glance over and give tips and see what kind of code is happening is very effective. It's not quite "extreme programming" but it works pretty well.