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 70 subscribers backing me for a total of $728/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1300-$1800/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.
RubyGems Work (Week 5)
I have been holding off on doing too much new work on RubyGems documentation because I needed to meet with Nick Quaranto (@qrush) to make sure that my plans matched with his original vision for the RubyGems guides. If you check the commit log for the guides, you'll see I pulled in a couple small fixes, but otherwise haven't made much progress on new guides. That said, I finally caught up with Nick over IRC on Wednesday, and we're on the same page, so I'll be able to do a lot more with guides in the coming weeks.
Mendicant University
Our plan for the next year of Mendicant University has been sent out out to our alumni network and the general consensus is that it's a good plan and that we'll move forward with it. I gave paid supporters an inside look at what we're planning by passing along the same video and PDF that I sent to our alumni, and that lead to some interesting discussion on the ruby-mendicant-supporters mailing list. I was excited to see some folks get involved who aren't directly involved in Mendicant University, but are supporting it through this subscription program. For those who aren't in either the Mendicant University alumni network or in the supporters network, we'll make the whole plan publicly available by July 15th.
Additionally, I just sent out the course guidelines for our July course today. That means we'll start seeing students send in project proposals soon!
Teach Me To Code podcast
I mentioned last week that I recorded a podcast with Chuck Max Wood about various things ranging from Mendicant University to RubyGems. It was released a few days ago, so check it out if you want to hear even more about what I've been working on.
Software Development for Beginners (Training in New Haven, CT)
Jordan and I will be hosting a local training here in New Haven, with our first session on July 6th. The first session will be free, and future sessions will be $20, to keep it affordable for anyone who wants to take it. The goal of this program is to take folks with no programming experience, show them what is possible, and then give them some guidance on how to get involved with programming as a hobby or possibly even a career. Stay tuned to this blog for registration information, and if you have friends or family in New Haven that you think would enjoy this sort of course, please send them our way.
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.
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 69 subscribers backing me for a total of $724/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1300-$1800/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.
I was away visiting family and trying to ward off sympthoms of burnout for a few days, but still managed to get some things done since the last progress report.
RubyGems Work (Week 4)
Things have really quieted down around RubyGems, and that means we've had a chance to catch our breath and consider priorities. Some effort is still going to be made on a compatibility layer, likely in the form of a backports gem, but the new plan is to focus on stabilizing the new APIs so that new breakage won't happen, and to help folks port old code to the new APIs as much as possible. That work is best left up to the maintainers of RubyGems, but for my part, what I can do is help with documentation. I now have commit access to RubyGems and the RubyGems guides, and will be gradually improving documentation over the next several weeks.
So far, I've only done a little: patched the README of RubyGems to fix an outdated reference to the RubyForge tracker, and triaged two requests in the rubygems/guides issue tracker. Due to my relative lack of experience with RubyGems itself, I am trying to encourage folks to contribute documentation patches themselves so that I can just help with cleanup and merging. However, I'm going to keep working on this even if I have to do the legwork myself: I think I can make an upgrade guide for end users and plugin developers that would be handy for those wanting to move to RubyGems 1.8. I have enough material from various tweets I've sent along to those trying to upgrade that I should be able to put together something useful.
Mendicant University
We are still working through our plans for the next school year of Mendicant University, which will start in September of this year. We are making a large number of small changes that should add up to a big difference in the way we do things. We still need to send our plans to our alumni network for review, but the staff has finally reached a consensus and we think we have a good plan put together. We will release the entire thing to the public within a few weeks, but for now I don't want to commit publicly to any of our plans without first getting feedback from our students.
If you're one of my paying supporters and want a bit more of an inside scoop, just ask on the supporters mailing list. These aren't secrets, I just rather not talk about work-in-progress plans in public right now. Everyone else, I apologize for how long this process has taken, we take changes to Mendicant University very seriously and are just trying hard to get it right.
Other Miscellaneous Stuff
I met with Sandi Metz on Tuesday to provide some feedback on her software design book that she's working on. She is doing some awesome stuff, and I'm really excited to be able to help her make the book even more awesome. This isn't exactly related to the Mendicant experiment, but still interesting and worth noting.
I was also a guest panelist once again for the Ruby Rogues podcast, this time around the topic was on debugging. You'll also see me on the Teach Me To Code podcast with Charles Max Wood some time next week. It was recorded yesterday, and covers various topics including Mendicant University, a retrospective on the Ruby Best Practices book I wrote a couple years ago, and my thoughts on community and open source.
Still fighting burnout
There has been so much going on in my life that I still find myself very exhausted and feeling kind of overwhelmed with everything. I think these feelings will pass once I get through all the various planning phases for my numerous projects and can buckle down and just get some work done. But for right now, I'm needing to take a few more breaks than I would like to just to remain feeling halfway productive. Please bear with me for the next few weeks, and then we should see productivity increasing once more.
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.
Right now, the RubyGems end user documentation sucks. Here's what we can do to fix it:
I now have commit access to github.com/rubygems/guides and will be spending some time making the above mentioned improvements. But I can really use your help figuring out where the problems are. Please file tickets or send pull requests, and I'll be sure to look into whatever you send my way. RubyGems can and should be awesome, but it will take the community's support to make it so.
If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know what's on your mind in the comments section below.
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 68 subscribers backing me for a total of $720/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1300-$1800/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.
This week is a bit light on the community side because I had to do a bit of commercial work to keep cash flowing, but there are still a few things worth reporting.
RubyGems Work (Week 3)
I've been busy on twitter finding people who are having problems with RubyGems and encouraging them to upgrade to 1.8.5 to see if it fixes their problems. For the most part, it has done the trick. Rails 2.3.12 was released yesterday, which fixed the compatibility issues many were experiencing. I've also been talking with Eric, Evan, and Ryan about various miscellaneous things behind the scenes, I'll be sure to report if any of the things we discussed actually materialize. The two main things I want to focus on is improving end user documentation, and on helping Evan with the compatibility layer stuff, but we're still trying to figure out what kind of work I'm best suited for.
In other news, one highly requested change was made: The RubyGems issue tracker is now on Github!
Mendicant University
Last week I mentioned that our May session was the most successful to date. Here are a couple reviews from the students who took the course: one from Vitor Pellegrino, another from Chris Geihsler.
Additionally, Jordan and I met to put together a plan for Mendicant University 2012. Our primary goal was to focus on quality rather than quantity and get together a plan that is sustainable. We are going to be putting this in front of our alumni early next week and will have something to report on by the next progress report.
GoRuCo Lightning Talk
I gave a lightning talk at GoRuCo outlining the history of the transition of PDF::Writer to Prawn, and it sort of came off as a rambling rant. Still, it's an interesting topic, and I've included the transcript of what I originally meant to say in my talk.
Monetization
After a few deep conversations with folks I really look up to at GoRuCo, it became clear to me that in order for my efforts to be sustainable, I need to stop worrying about whether I'm going to have enough money two months from now. These subscriptions help a lot with that, but they're part of the long term game, at least until they're clearing $2000/mo or more. So unfortunately, that means that I will need to spend some time on monetization which will at least partially take me away from my community work. However, I'm going to try to do that in classy ways, at least at first, so as to maximize the amount of social value of the work that I do.
Jordan (@Jordan_Byron) and I have put plans together for teaching an affordable local community course in software development for beginners here in New Haven. It'll be a six week course with the first session for free, and the five sessions to follow that one costing $100 total ($20/session). This won't come close to paying the mortgage, but might just be another trickle of revenue that's a fixed commitment and does something pretty helpful for our local community. I have to say though, the difference in pay is a bit staggering when I'm used to being able to charge $900 for a weekend at Compleat Rubyist. But the whole point of this is to make it affordable... so that's where we stand with that.
We're also still working hard on Duke Nukem Forever the book website for my Ruby Object System eBook. As soon as we get that passed through BrainTree, we can start accepting pre-orders which should help somewhat. We have a laundry list of other ideas as well if these two don't bring in enough in the near term, but in actuality I'll likely need to continue to dip into consulting here and there, which is better than nothing, but manages to be a huge distraction to me. Personally I just hope that these subscriptions continue to grow so that I can not think about these things, but that's just not practical on $700/month. That said, this money is making a HUGE difference for me, so I can't thank those who've subscribed enough.
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.
NOTE: Taking a short break to visit family
Over the next few days I'll be stepping away from the keyboard and visiting with family and generally relaxing. I should be back on top of things by Tuesday, but have felt dangerously close to burnout for the last two weeks and need to recharge the batteries.
A few days ago I asked for reports of what libraries were broken by RubyGems 1.8. Here's a comprehensive list of what was reported so far, and a status update on each. Please note that while these updates reflect the best of my knowledge, they're based primarily on conversations I've had and aren't necessarily completely reliable. That said, several of these issues are actually slated to be retroactively fixed in RubyGems itself when Evan releases 1.8.6 on Monday, so it may not matter.
Rails 2.3.11 (confirmed and fixed)
There was a small incompatibility issue in Rails that Ryan Davis fixed on May 25th. Rails 2.3.12 will be released on Monday, June 6th and will make Rails 2.3 compatible with RubyGems 1.8.5 again. If you want to try it out now, try updating to the 2-3-stable branch via git.
Redmine (confirmed and fixed)
Redmine is currently broken, but this is related to the Rails 2.3.11 issue. Should be fixed simultaneously.
Spork (confirmed and fixed)
I looked into this myself, though I only focused on obvious issues because I didn't have a link to a specific mailing list post or bug report. But when I installed the latest stable spork gem (0.8.5), I found that running the spork executable failed to run and spewed out telltale gem related issues. The good news is that from my very limited testing, at least that issue is solved by using the current prerelease (spork-0.9.0.rc8). Please try out the pre-release and let me know if it doesn't fix the breakage for you (and also, file a ticket on github, too)
rake-compiler (confirmed and fixed)
An issue in the intersection of RubyGems and Rake was found and fixed in rake-compiler 0.7.9. Thanks Luis!
UPDATE: There may be an issue in the intersection of RubyGems and Rake after all, see the comment from Luis Lavena in the comments thread. It is being investigated
There was some breakage in rake-compiler but these seem to be related to Rake 0.9, not RubyGems 1.8. However, one user claims that he cannot get rake-compiler working on RubyGems 1.8.5. So far, I've not seen anyone able to reproduce his issues. I attempted to reproduce them myself, and could not, though I don't know anything aboutrake-compiler and just got as far as compiling "Hello World"
----
So far, this is all I've heard about. Please investigate these reports on your own, because I'm a complete n00b here. But also, please report anything that isn't on this list, so that I can look into new issues as well. RubyGems 1.8 compatibility is important, because it is what will ship with Ruby 1.9.3, and in fact, has already been merged into what will become the Ruby 1.9.3 release.
In the past few days I have vocally opposed SlimGems because I feel it is a distraction that is getting in the way of peacemaking when it comes to RubyGems. But this is a bit like attending an anti-war rally rather than a peace rally. I admit that this is my own failing, I presented myself as a mediator without fully understanding what that means. Frankly, I'm tired of that aspect of things, and won't be discussing the politics of this situation publicly anymore. But I have not given up. Here's what I will be doing:
Many people have quietly thanked me for my efforts, but a few have loudly criticized them. I hope the above list of items are less likely to flare up more conflicts. Anyone who doubts my intentions or feels like my way of doing things has been flawed, I hope I can change your mind through my change in course of actions. But if not, I welcome you to contact me privately so that we can share context with each other, something painfully missing from most internet arguments.
I will not be responding to any comments left on this post, but I would like to ask those who appreciate what I'm doing, even if they've been quiet before, to just leave a note here stating that publicly. Many of you have thanked me privately or through a tweet, and that means a lot. But I'm hoping to show the folks who have beaten me up over the last few days that my efforts are not unwanted.
One of the few things I still do commercially is act as a technical advisor to a food Co-op that is starting up here in New Haven, CT. Because I really like this client and feel that they have a really cool, unique position that needs filling, I've decided to post a job listing here on this blog. I wrote the job description myself, so hopefully it'll reach the kind of people who appreciate the sort of things I've been doing. They did not ask me to do this or pay for advertising here in any way, I just really like working with them.
Elm City Market is looking for an IT Manager to build out and maintain the technical infrastructure that is needed to run our store. The ideal candidate is someone who is comfortable working with all the necessary hardware and software to run a retail operation. This includes our POS system, accounting software, logistics software, as well as in store systems such as cash registers, scales and scanners. Our IT Manager will also be responsible for building out and maintaining a network of back-office systems for our administrative staff.
Because Elm City Market is a fast-paced startup environment, we need someone who has excellent communications skills. In particular, our ideal candidate is someone who is comfortable working with non-technical staff to meet business needs with reliable technical solutions. We expect our IT manager to either have a background in working with food Co-ops and natural foods stores, or to be a fast learner who can quickly gain an understanding of our unique needs.If this position sounds like a good fit for you, please send a letter of interest and resume to jobs@elmcitymarket.coop. Also, don't hesitate to contact us if have questions that you'd like answered before submitting an application.
If you have a background in IT management for a retail store, or know someone that does, please get in touch with Elm City Market. It's a really cool opportunity because we're talking about a business that has a community-centric mission and literally just poured the cement floors on their market, so you'd get to see it grow from the ground up.
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.
In my initial explorations of the RubyGems source code, I found that the test output was very noisy due to a deprecation warning coming from Syck's implementation of YAML.quick_emit. This method will eventually be removed and has no replacement in Syck, but the new YAML library in Ruby 1.9, Psych, implements it without deprecations. The problem is that Psych itself won't be activated unless you have libyaml installed. I use rvm and homebrew, and found a post by Xavier Shay for how to get everything working.
However, because Wayne Seguin was hanging out on the #rubygems channel at the time I was figuring this all out, he let me know that the latest rvm will build libyaml for you automatically, with no special flags. So here's the official way to get things working with Psych, let me know if it does the trick for you: rvm get head ; rvm remove 1.9.2 ; rvm install 1.9.2
I'll keep posting these gotchas as I dig into the RubyGems source, and then collect them somewhere centralized once I've gone through my initial explorations.
I have decided to do a code audit and archeological dig on the RubyGems source code. What I want to find out is whether RubyGems 1.8.5 is breaking anything significant in the Ruby ecosystem, and whether those problems can be solved without the full restoration of the 1.3.7 API. So if RubyGems has broken something you use, and it's still broken, please link me to bug reports, blog posts, or any other information that can help me understand what broke, and help me find out what needs to be done to fix it.
I've been asking for this for a while, but have received very few concrete examples of what RubyGems 1.8 is breaking. This is a serious question, if you give me good examples, I'm going to work hard to figure out how to get your problems fixed.
Hello, my name is Gregory Brown. I am the founder of Mendicant University, a free online school for software developers.
I am passionate about community service, education, and the free software movement. If you're interested in getting to know me a bit better, feel free to send me an email: gregory.t.brown@gmail.com
