Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Free to a Good Home: The Ruby Programming Shop

About a year ago, I started a project called The Ruby Programming Shop (or the RPS). Our intent was to adopt languishing Ruby libraries and give them some extra loving — add or update documentation, fill out unit test suites, refactor, update, and add features. We intended to take each project on for two or three months, so that we could cycle through four to six of them each year.

I'd envisioned the RPS as a way to help polish some of the resources available to the Ruby community, while giving less experienced Ruby hackers a chance to learn more about the Ruby way of doing things.

We made several attempts, but were only mildly successful with one of our projects, r43. I think this would be a great project for an active Ruby Brigade to jump on, with members working on it during hacking nights as well as at other times. An individual who wanted to head up the RPS could also do a good job if she's able to recruit, organize, and motivate a group of Ruby hackers to work with her.

If you're interested in taking the RPS over, please leave a message here with some ideas about what you'd want to do with it over the next year.

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