Welcome to the November 2016 Ruby Together monthly update! This month included maintenance work, security patches, helping users with problems, and learning several bad ways to handle gems with required_ruby_version.
André travelled to Cincinnati, OH to give a talk about contributing to open source, and we paid for 129.5 hours of work on Bundler, RubyGems, and RubyGems.org.
We’ll also be using this update to highlight our international contributors! They’re mentioned in each relevant news section.
ruby together news
This month we had 13 new members! Eight new developers joined, including Minku Lee, Wolfgang Rittner, Adrien Jarthon, Fritz Grabo, Frederic Gingras, Mischa Lewis-Norelle, and Justin Burris. We also had three signups for new Friends of Ruby Together. Thank you, everyone! <3
Five companies joined as members, including Brakeman Pro, Kundigo, ChartMogul, Rabid Technologies, and Fretless.
On November 13, André gave a talk at RubyConf called From No OSS Experience to the Core Team in 15 Minutes per Day. It discusses the benefits and costs of doing open source work and provides a straightforward list of activities that can be done by anyone, no matter their level of experience with programming. Watch the video, check out the slides, and/or read the talk as a blog post: How to Contribute to OSS.
At RubyConf, we gave away almost 1,000 stickers! We also gave almost 50 Ruby Together lapel pins to members. If you’re wishing for some stickers or lapel pins of your own, you’re in luck! At RubyConf, we also launched the Ruby Together shop!
We have merch!
Fulfill your sticker, pin, or shirt dreams… we even have Bundler packing tape. 😂 Shirts and tape are on order and will ship soon, while stickers and pins ship immediately!
We had three improvements with our meta tooling this month. The how_is tool got another release, and will soon be used to actively appraise the status of our various projects.
We also created a time-card handler for the lita bot, soon to be available for use in a chat room near you!
Finally, we shipped a new merge-bot: @bundlerbot. We’ve been using the homu.io service for over a year, but a long-standing bug prevented us from managing team member permissions. Now we have our own copy of homu, and we look forward to updating team members and merging only green code for years to come.
Last in Ruby Together news, this month we partnered with @mrb_bk’s Computer Modern. We need more companies to join as members for Ruby Together to be sustainable in the long run, so it’s exciting to have expert help. We’ll be working with Computer Modern in the coming weeks and months to create resources for Ruby developers and Ruby Together members.
bundler news
This month bundler and bundler.io got an array of documentation fixes / updates, due in large part to our new contributor @colby-swandale.
Bundler got a Request For Comments repo, inspired by the one utilized by Rust. We fixed outdated not listing all outdated gems. And we also fixed an ObjectBoundsExceededError on Rubinius.
As mentioned last month, Bundler 1.13 shipped with required_ruby_version support for Gemfiles containing a ruby declaration. Building on that, we hoped to release 1.14 with automatic support for the currently running Ruby version.
Over the last two months or so, the Bundler team has been discussing and experimenting with different ways to handle Gemfiles without an explicit ruby. The heroic @segiddins attempted to implement our rough consensus for the feature, but we ran into a plethora of edge cases and problems with backwards compatibility. In the end, we went back to the drawing board and designed a new way to handle it that should be much better.
Downside: this work delayed Bundler 1.14, and now we’re going to ship 1.14 without automatic Ruby locking. Upside: it will be a much better feature when it’s done. Hooray.
In total, 11 authors pushed 59 commits to Bundler last month. 61 files changed and there were 1,990 additions and 1,629 deletions.
rubygems.org news
This month in RubyGems.org, we improved messaging for yanked and reserved namespace gems. Reduced the database calls required for search requests. And added email verification to new user accounts.
These changes were from RubyGems.org team member Aditya Prakash. Overall, 8 authors pushed 40 commits to all branches, and 70 files changed. There were 1,135 additions and 360 deletions.
rubygems news
This month in RubyGems, we added displaying the current Ruby version when a version requirement is not met. We updated the messaging when getting errors during cert building. And we fixed a malformed version number error.
Most of this work was done by @bronzdoc, one of our great RubyGems contributors. In total, 6 authors pushed 12 commits. 14 files changed, and there were 164 additions and 85 deletions.
gemstash news
Meanwhile in Gemstash, the documentation was completely rewritten using Pandoc to pave the way for a website that shares documentation with the gem. During the month, 3 authors pushed 15 commits, 22 files changed, and there were 254 additions and 66 deletions.
budget & expenses
From October 19 to November 18, Ruby Together took in $22,109. In total, we spent $27,353.26. Here’s a breakdown of where the money went:
- $8,615 for 57.4 hours worked on Bundler at $150/hour
- $6,504 for 43.4 hours worked on RubyGems.org at $150/hour
- $4,313 for 28.8 hours worked on RubyGems at $150/hour
- $73.38 on dedicated servers for RubyBench.org
- $694.5 on payment processing fees
- $2,167.27 on company overhead like hosting, services, software, hardware, taxes, etc
- $2,117.39 on accounting, copywriting, design, and other professional services
- $2,869.75 on marketing, evangelism, conferences, and community outreach
Until next time,
André, Lynn and the Ruby Together team