Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis, with no formal sponsorship or funding beyond individual contributions. I want to make this sustainable on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I have 62 subscribers backing me for a total of $644/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1450-$1950/month more to maintain our current lifestyle. However, the current subscribers have given me a great start, and I'm continuing on with the experiment for now. To remain transparent, I am doing frequent updates on what I've been working on so that folks know what their money is supporting.

Mending RubyGems Fences (Week 2)

Since last week's progress report, I've been even more active on working to resolve issues surrounding RubyGems. I've been blogging things as I go, but the most significant progress so far is that we've got the team to agree to what I feel is a very reasonable release management policy. However, my efforts so far were not enough to stop the SlimGems fork of RubyGems from being released, which turned up the heat once more, but also brought some issues up that I hadn't considered before. I've decided that to be able to continue to be helpful with the RubyGems situation, I can't just rely on talking anymore, but need to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty with some code. I'm planning to get familiar with the RubyGems source code over the next week or so, in particular exploring the changes since RubyGems 1.3.7 to 1.8.5. I've also reached out to folks who have experienced breakage as a result of RubyGems upgrades, in the hopes that I can investigate what caused the problems they ran into.

Two concrete goals are on my radar as part of this expedition into the RubyGems source. The first is that I want to write some documentation about the internals and the changes that have been happening so that there is more information out there for folks to make informed decisions based on. The second is that I've been talking with Evan Phoenix about some creative ways to meet the 'backwards compatibility forever' goals of SlimGems in a less divisive way. However, both of these things depend heavily on how quickly I can front load on RubyGems knowledge, it may end up being a slow process.

Those who want to listen to an hour long discussion about this whole situation should listen to this week's Ruby Rogues podcast, I was a guest!

Mendicant University

We just wrapped up the May core skills course on Tuesday and have welcomed 10 new students into our alumni network. Our pass rate was 66%, with everyone except one student who stayed past the first week successfully completing the course. These are our best numbers ever, and that's largely thanks to the five other volunteers who helped out with the course: Shane Emmons, Steve Klabnik, Raoul Felix, Jaime Iniesta, and Justin Ramel. However, the end of the course is always the busiest part for me, because I have to review everyone's final submissions and individual projects. There were some very neat projects this time around, so I look forward to announcing them publicly within the next few days.

This week also gave way to a very significant milestone for Mendicant University, we have invited Shane Emmons to join us on staff! There is a short announcement over on our website, but we're absolutely thrilled to have Shane join us as our first teacher who is also an alumnus of our program. Shane's efforts will make it possible for us to really keep pushing things forward, and you'll be sure to see a huge impact from having him on our team within the next few months.

Last but not least, we're still in the process of selections for the July core skills session. It looks like we're going to fill up in the next couple days, nearly two weeks ahead of schedule.

There is a whole lot more going on at Mendicant University, but I'm going to need some time to catch my breath and also balance things out a bit with my RubyGems efforts. Expect to hear more next week, in particular, there should be at least a few interesting things of general value to the community by then.

Mailing List and IRC Channel for Ruby Mendicant Supporters

I have been promising for weeks now that I'd open up some communications channels for my paying supporters so that they can reach me in a more personalized setting. I have set up a mailing list and IRC channel for these purposes, and you should have received an email with info for how to access them if you're currently subscribed as a Ruby Mendicant Supporter. Please do make good use of these channels! I may be very busy over the next few days, but I would eventually like to talk with each and every person who is backing me, if only to find out what kind of things they're interested in and whether my work has been useful to them. I am not entirely sure how soon we'll have any sort of formal events such as office hours or other things like that, but we can at least start getting to know each other.

Want to Contribute?

If the things I'm working on sound worthwhile to you and you want to support it, please subscribe! It will help me keep doing good stuff for the community without having to focus too much on making ends meet. I've been doing this since December but only recently started accepting funding, so it will really help me counterbalance several months of burning through my savings.

Please let me know what you think of what I've been doing so far. This has been a fun few weeks and I want to keep the momentum going, but I also want to make sure that the work I'm doing is in line with what the community considers valuable.