CruiseControl.rb, by ThoughtWorks, is an elegant Continuous Integration dashboard for Ruby projects. This article shows how to call the RoR command “rake stats” once per build, capture the results, and chart them to track trends over time.

Our goal is this chart:

Though I’m typing this from a Mac right now, I’m hardly a fan boy. I spend a little less than half of my time on OS X, the rest spent on cheap PC hardware and ArchLinux, and honestly, I’m happy with both (each for different reasons)

Still, Apple definitely got some things right, and not the least of which was hiring Laurent Sansonetti. He’s the guy who’s been working on cool projects such as RubyCocoa and RubyOSA, and now has just released MacRuby.

MacRuby sounds cool:

MacRuby is a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C. More precisely, MacRuby is currently a port of the Ruby 1.9 implementation for the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector.

Though I’m not actively doing Mac specific Ruby development, that doesn’t mean I can’t extend thanks to a very cool hacker who has been dropping cool free software projects on our community like it was his job…. oh wait… it is. :)

Thanks Laurent for your contributions! You’re one of the reasons why the Ruby community rocks.

When I wrote the post I’d love to quit my job! (sort of), I was mainly aiming to start a conversation.

Still, enough people took me seriously, and now I can announce that the project is officially under way. I’m in the fund raising stages to collect $8000 so that I can take off 6 months of work to focus on important Ruby open source projects. That sounds even lower than my initial estimate, and the reason for that is because Ruby Central, Inc. decided to back the project! Here’s their press release:

RUBY CENTRAL, INC. WILL MATCH FUNDS DONATED TO GREG BROWN,
UP TO A TOTAL OF $5,000

Ruby Central is always on the lookout for interesting ways to help and
support the Ruby community, and Greg Brown has provided us with one.

Greg has announced a unique plan for himself. You can see the whole plan at
http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/proposal; meanwhile, here’s Greg’s capsule
summary of the idea:

** Through the donations of community members, I would like to put my
commercial and personal software projects on the back burner for a
prolonged period of time (3-6 months), and focus on working on open
source projects that are of high importance to the majority of
Rubyists. **

Greg has already started to receive donations. And now, Ruby Central
is coming on board to help Greg with matching funds.

Ruby Central will match gross donations to Greg, dollar for dollar, up
to $5000 (five thousand) dollars. That means that if you donate $50 to
Greg’s effort, we’ll donate $50. We’ll stick to the same timeline that Greg
has set for himself (see the above URL).

It’s not quite like anything we’ve done before, but it sounds like a good idea
at the right time, and we’re happy to support Greg’s unusual and imaginative
endeavor.

Please keep in mind that donations to Greg are not donations to Ruby
Central, and therefore do not fall under our tax-exempt status.

Ruby Central, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, chartered to
support Ruby-related events and initiatives that benefit the Ruby community.

Peter Cooper has also decided to support the project by both donating, and posting a summary on Ruby Inside. He does a good job of covering the whole of the story, including relating to those who feel uncomfortable supporting such an effort. I totally understand people’s skepticism, and thats why I encourage people to come talk on the RubyMendicant google group if they have any doubts about the project they want cleared up. The explicit timeline for this project and the fact that I’ve promised to record public hours will hopefully put some folks minds at ease.

Peter mentions that I talked about working on PDF::Writer or Ruport, but this doesn’t really fully explain what I was thinking of doing. With respect to PDF::Writer, I was pondering a from scratch rewrite with a sexy API and less performance problems. With Ruport, I was going to work on 1.9 compatibility for all of its dependencies across ruport-util and acts_as_reportable. Though I haven’t checked in with the maintainers of these libraries yet, it’s truly a laundry list of general purpose gems I’d be working to update. Here are just a few:

• RubyDBI
• Gruff
• Scruffy
• PDF::Writer
• transaction-simple
• roo
• rubyzip

Outside of Ruport, there are lots of libraries that I’d like to see working on 1.9, and with enough time, I could work on porting them.

The ideas list will be open for suggestions until April 1st when the donations close, the goal is to focus on things that might be hard to reach from traditional open source work that is done in people’s spare time or as part of a commercial project.

Anyway, this is going to be my last mooching attempt on the O’Reilly blog for this project. If you’ve read through the proposal I’ve put together and want to support the project, please consider a donation. If you’ve got questions, please ask them. And perhaps most importantly: If you like this idea, please spread the word. Having Rubyists show that they back this effort is worth more than cash to me, because it gives me confidence that this might actually work.

At the time of writing, with the matching from Ruby Central, Inc., I have enough money for at least two weeks one month of work. That means this project is a ‘go’ even if no one else donates. Of course, a lot more can be done with 26 weeks than with two.

The next post about this you’ll see here from me is going to be a progress report of what I’ve been working on. Until then, thanks so much to those who have supported and will support this project. I think it’ll be a great experiment, and that good things will come from it.

This project upgrades an online forum to add a search engine, using Test Driven Development. Our tools are RoR’s Beast, Sphinx, and (naturally) assert{ 2.0 }.

We follow this MVC guideline:

Anything a user can do to the data through the Views,
a unit test can do, the same way, through the Models

UPDATE: Okay kids, now it’s 50% fantasy. It’s up to you to cover the other 50% by donating and spreading the word, after reading my proposal. Here’s hoping for the best!

UPDATE: Though my original post was 95% a fantasy, I’ve received some funding offers that have brought it down to 75% fantasy. I will be documenting any planning I’m doing towards via a wiki called RubyMendicant. If you’d like to follow this on the bleeding edge, keep an eye out on that wiki. Otherwise, if you hear an official announcement within the next few weeks, you’ll know I decided to take the plunge, and if you don’t, then it’s safe to assume this idea went the way of the dodo. If you like this idea, please spread the word through the usual means of the intertubes by sharing this post and the wiki link with others.

Here’s a crazy idea I just had, and I’m wondering what folks think about it.

People do open source for a lot of reasons, ranging from pragmatic to idealistic. Some write a patch every six months or so, others do what they can to dedicate their life to it. Though I try to have a life outside of software, I’m definitely more on the obsessed end of the spectrum when it comes to contributing to open source software.

I find myself in a rather unique situation: Single, living alone in a small studio apartment, only taking a class or two here and there, and basically living off of small contracts. It’s not that I’m not offered big gigs, or that I couldn’t go back to school full time if I really wanted to, I just find I enjoy living a simple lifestyle that lets me spend a lot of time on community oriented projects, especially Ruby stuff.

Right now, I need to do some work each month to pay the rent, and slowly save up to make sure I don’t get evicted during a slow work month. Between BTree and Madriska, I could say that I have two of the most open source friendly commercial relationships I’ve ever seen. Though I’m working on real projects with them, things that have to actually fit some sort of business need, they give me a lot of leeway to improve open source software while working on them, Ruport is pushed along heavily by this.

I could see myself doing that for a while. Working with a few different clients I trust, who in turn hook me up with interesting projects for a variety of companies in various different domains. A lot of it might be Rails work, but not all of it is. Still, in a moment of idealistic fantasy, I thought of another idea:

What if I could just do open source for a while, non-commercially?

How much would it cost for me to do at least 80 hours a month of development on software projects such as PDF::Writer, Ruport, and some other projects I wish I had the time to get my hands on?

I did the math, and the number came out low (subjective). I could meet all my expenses and save some money for about $2000 a month. Basically, if 200 people donated $60 right now, I could take 6 months off and do nearly 500 hours of work, and that’s only if I didn’t find myself obsessed with and doing extra hours on a project. I could more-or-less maintain my lifestyle that I have now, but not take on contracting projects that are either too big or too small out of necessity. Sure, this works out to be a lot lower than my contracting rate, but I could hack entirely on open source projects, maybe write some documentation and articles, and still be able to afford a class or two a semester. Sounds beautiful to me, though I’m sure it’s just a fantasy.

Indulging me for the moment, how would I remain accountable to anyone who supported such a venture? I’d make it transparent as possible. I’d record public hours, with links to changesets, tickets, blog posts, whatever. Though people would have to accept good faith (with at least a roughly outlined plan) as to ‘where I direct the time’, they’d get to see every bit of ‘where the hours went’.

What prevents this from being a total scam? You do. Though I don’t have some A-List reputation, I still make my living based on my reputation as a developer and a contractor. If I somehow totally screwed people who supported such an effort, all it would take would be enough negative feedback from the community to prevent me from getting away with dishonesty.

What would indicate a great success? If after 6 months, this all worked out, and I was interested in doing it for another 6 months, if people funded it, we’d know they actually liked what I did the first time around.

Finally, this doesn’t have to be me. It could be any old hacker you choose, someone you trust that’s working on things you’re interested in. They’d tell you how much it’d cost to have them quit their day job for 6 months, and hopefully people could pool resources. Though the open source community is kept alive by small day to day contributions, we all know the power of having someone dedicated to a project with copious free time.

I’m talking in theory, because obviously there are some complications. If I personally were to do this, I’d need to cycle out of some projects, and figure out to what extent it’d piss of the people I work with. Still, I am sort of curious, is this an idea that belongs in the trashbin, or should I open up a pledgie account for donations? :)

Maybe this is something that could be done on a trial basis, such as ‘40 hrs over 1 month’. This is something I could do without putting a close to all my work. Given that, based on my needs (not my billable rate), that’d be um… 10 dollars from 100 people?

On the one hand, this seems almost like a joke to me, a sort of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’. Still, if some respected Rubyist wanted to steal this idea, undercut me on the price, and ask people to start donating, would I be among them? You bet ya.

Let me know what you think. I’ve tried so hard over the last few years to find ethical and practical ways to work in open source development, and they pretty much work. But because of that, I’ve mostly ignored the idealistic ones, and this is just a shot in the dark at one of those.