The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - News Roundup (Interview)

Episode Date: August 8, 2012

Andrew and Wynn run down the news from the last month.

This is Laurent Cincinnati, the creator of MacRuby and RubyMotion, and you're listening to the Changelog podcast. Welcome to the Changelog episode 0.8.4. I'm Adam Stachowiak. And I'm Winn Netherland. This is the ChangeLog. We cover what's fresh and new in open source. If you found us on iTunes, we're also up on the web at thechangelog.com. We're also up on GitHub. Head to github.com slash explore. You'll find some trending repos, some feature repos from our blog, as well as the audio podcast. And if you're on Twitter, you can follow the ChangeLog and me, Adam Stack. And I'm Penguin, P-E-N-G-W-Y-N-N. Fun episode this week.

Something a little different. Andrew and I talked about the news of pretty much the last month. We used to do the archive shows. We're trying to get back into that groove. Bringing it back, huh? Bringing it back. So Andrew, if you haven't met him, he's been keeping the fires burning on the blog with a lot of good HTML5 content. Andrew Hales from Virginia.

Andrew P. Thorpe on Twitter. Yeah. I like Andrew. Good guy. Andrew's a good guy. We met recently when he came to Dallas. Hopefully he can relocate down here. Have another good Rubyist in the DFW area.

There you go. So we kind of ran through the, uh, the news of the month. We're hoping to kind of reinstate this maybe once a month just to talk about what's popular on the blog. There you go. It's always good to do a roundup of what's been out there to just get, uh, the thoughts.

We do so many quick hits. It's, it's nice to come back and see what resonates with the listeners. Yeah. Piece it all together. Fun episode this week. Sure. Get to it after this quick word from RubyConf Argentina? Let's do it.

We're chatting today with Ernesto Tagwerker. He's going to tell us about RubyConf Argentina. Hey, Wim. Yeah, RubyConf Argentina is a yearly event organized by the Ruby Argentina Association. And last year, we had some really renowned speakers from all over the world, like Aaron Patterson, Scott Chacon, Konstantin Hasse, and Matt Imanetti. And this year is going to be October 19th and 20th? Yeah, that's right. Where's the location? It's going to be October 19th and 20th in Paseo La Plaza, which is a big theater in the heart of Buenos Aires,

close to a lot of things, a lot of touristic sites. And yeah, we're happy to have a place that is bigger than last year. So in addition to those speakers, who's going to be speaking this year? This year, we're going to have speakers from all over the world, again, like Nicola Sanguinetti from Uruguay, also known as Godfucka, Pedro Bello from Heroku, you, Wynn from GitHub, and Alejandro Gonzalez from Chile. Also, we have not closed our proposal call. So if you're interested in sending your proposal, we'll be happy to review it and hopefully you can make it as a speaker this year. You've got until August 17th to get that in, right? Yes, that is correct.

We're still awaiting details on tickets and some other things, but where can folks go to learn more about the conference? If you want to know more about the conference or see the videos from last year's talk, you can go to rubycompargentina.org, and you'll find all the talks, all the information about the place where it will be, all the sponsors we have, and what we're planning for this year. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to it. It'll be my first trip down to Argentina and hope to see the rest of you, the listeners down there. And Ernesto, it'll be the first time that we've met face-to-face, so I'm looking forward to that too.

Cool, yeah, we're really looking forward to having you over and having new speakers as well as speakers that we had last year. And I would just like to point out that we have talks for all levels. We have talks for advanced Rubyists and for beginners too. We have the Ruby Funday, which will have workshops for those who are interested in getting into Ruby. And we will have really advanced talks by these awesome speakers that we're still confirming as we speak. So one more time, that's October 19th and 20th in Buenos Aires, Rubiconf, Argentina. See you there.

Welcome to the Changelog Archive. It's been a while since we've done one of these rap shows, but we thought it was due. I wanted to say a special welcome to Andrew Thorpe, who joins us online. Thanks for having me. First time caller. First time caller, long time listener. Andrew's been helping out with contributing to Changelog, I guess, since May. We're certainly glad to have him on board. this time is the first time on the audio.

So what we do here, if you're new to this format, we're just going to run down not news of the day, but news of the last couple of months. Usually we used to do this about once a month. It's been a while since we've been in that regular rhythm, but we thought we've had enough kind of stack up on the site that we can talk through some of these and just share what you might have missed on the changelog. So up first, Gitspective, Facebook-style timeline for your GitHub feed. Have you seen this one? Yeah, I think this was actually one of the first ones that I actually tried to mess around with when I saw it pop up here.

And it seemed like it was pretty neat at the time when I saw it. The features seemed like they were still kind of being worked through, but it definitely looked like it had some good potential. I enjoyed it. From our buddy Zach. This brings kind of a Facebook-style timeline, if you're familiar with the new Facebook cover, style timeline for your Facebook feed. This brings it to your GitHub feed and puts it kind of vertical line for the timeline,

and then they're stacked. Events are stacked on each side of those. It's a nice way to visualize your GitHub feed. It uses the GitHub API, which I'm a fan. Yeah, you would be. It's interesting, actually, because as much as I love GitHub, I think everybody loves GitHub, but one of the things that has been difficult for me is figuring out the activity, the feed, the notifications from GitHub, and I wonder if projects like this will kind of

help to take that to the next level. It would be interesting. But I've frequently found myself seeing, you know, I have 20 something notifications from GitHub that I never even kind of realized that were there. So it'd be cool to see some of this stuff get incorporated into some of the GitHub core. It's a hard problem from a UX perspective just to handle that much data, especially unlike a lot of social networks. These are really different types of activity that we've got on the GitHub activity timeline. So this does a good job of kind of presenting that in a filterable format.

Yeah, I think we're so used to with the social world, we're so used to following everything you can find and friending everybody you can find. But I found myself wanting to kind of purge out some of these projects that I had been following with that mindset just to kind of clean it up a little bit. And I found once I did that, it made the activity feed a little bit easier. So I actually did that because when I was looking through this GetSpective, I noticed that there was just a bunch of stuff in there that I didn't really care about anymore. So I was very interested with it, very interested in its potential. It just definitely caught my attention. You know, I find myself doing that too, kind of reserving what I watch on GitHub just because

it adds so much noise to the timeline. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where they were discontinuing the sponge and Elaine was going around wondering if her boyfriends were sponge worthy. Now I have to wonder if a project is watch worthy for me to be able to pull the trigger to pollute my timeline with all of its commits. So it's like Twitter bootstrap. I mean, how many people are following that now? Yeah, like Twitter bootstrap. I mean, how many people are following that now? Yeah, specifically Twitter bootstrap. Actually, there are a few projects that we have written about on the changelog that I've noticed are just, there are so many followers. And I'm wondering, I mean, I wonder when I see that, does that, does that mean that this project is something that everyone should keep note of? Or is it just the, um, the world that we're living in with, you know, following everything you can possibly find. And those have just been around longer. I don't know. It's interesting. It's kind of the social world that

we're living in now. Well, Bootstrap, specifically, I guess, has got twice as many followers as the number two project on GitHub. And it just creates a massive amount of data problems just in and of itself. But yeah, popularity breeds new problems, but I guess those are good problems to have. Yeah, it's an old problem. You want to become popular, but there's a lot of growing pains that come with it.

Up next, I want to talk about HammerJS. This is one of the projects you posted. Yeah, this is actually the first one that I posted on the changelog, and I used it quite a few times before I posted this, and I fell in love with it. I was trying to solve the problem of handling touch events and handling click events on one application. So, you know, there's a iOS problem where, it's not a problem, it's just a design decision where when you put your finger on the screen, there's about a 300 millisecond delay before a click event is registered. And so trying to figure out how to eliminate that when you're trying to do very fast interfaces. And instead of manually handling all the touch start and touch stop, and you still have to handle click for your desktop version of your site, it basically gave me a very easy way to just register a tap event

or a double tap event or handling some drag problems. So yeah, it was actually a very, very useful project, and not to mention one of the coolest landing pages. I mean, HammerJS and the whole, their catchphrase is, you can touch

this. It was a very fun project to kind of work with. I really, really enjoyed that project. Extra points on the changelog for humor in your readme. This ties into the whole MC Hammer thing they got going. Can't believe you couldn't use hammer, don't hurt him in the headline. That would have been perfect. Well, you have to realize it was the first thing I was writing, so I wasn't sure exactly how much creative freedom I had.

That may be before your time anyway. I think it was, I'm fairly young, but it was still relatively popular when I was growing up. Sad to admit that I actually caught Hammer in concert. It was one of the first concerts I ever went to. Did you wear your parachute pants to it? I didn't have the pants, but yeah, it was an interesting concert, to say the least. Another one that you posted, TweetStream, easily accessed the Twitter streaming API. So Twitter has a couple of APIs, the REST API, which I guess most people are familiar with, but the streaming API is where you open a persistent connection and you get new data.

It's just kind of sent down to you as it happens. And Twitter, one of the Ruby libraries for that is TweetStream, originally created by Intrida, now taken over by Steve and Eric, friends of the show. You wrote this one up? Yeah, so this was actually early on for me too. And one of the interesting things about this, specifically about this article, was this was the first time I actually was corrected multiple times by – specifically by Eric, which was fine. It was interesting to see even when you're writing an article up about the open source world, that people really enjoy getting involved and helping out. So I think I misrepresented who the authors behind TweetStream were originally, and that was able to be corrected. And so yeah, that was encouraging to me to see, even with writing, when I write

something incorrectly, the open source world just helps. And that's one of the very attractive things about the open source world to me. But specifically about these two... Okay, so yes, TweetStream is a very neat gem. It allows you to hook into the Twitter streaming API. It's actually built on top of EM Twitter, which is an event machine client for the Twitter streaming API. But basically, it's a very, very easy interface to use that allows you to just kind of pull the data into your Ruby application very easily. T, the command line interface for Twitter, is built on top of the TweetStream gem, and I've used all of them. I've been using T a lot.

I love that little project. Yeah, I enjoy it. I am like you. I really do enjoy the text mode world. But for some reason, Twitter is the one that I can't do. I cannot find myself in text mode on Twitter. I need to use the Twitter app or the website. Unfortunately, the app hasn't been updated in quite a while.

Yeah, it's by no means my primary client, but I just love the way that T is written to be all Unix-y under the hood, so you can pipe everything between commands, and it's kind of prompted me to get into the shell scripting world a little bit deeper. Right now I'm trying to write a ZShell completion script for T just to kind of round out some skills in that area, and it's kind of fascinating how those work. As soon as I get hooked on a new command line client, the next thing I have to do, because

I'm lazy, is build some completion scripts for it because I hate having to look at the usage banner all the time. Yeah, I think the ZShell completion scripts specifically are incredible. Since switching over to ZShell, I have thoroughly enjoyed that. Early on when I was using, I think I was using OMI ZSH, there was a few conflicts with some of the completion that was kind of driving me crazy. And since I went to a more vanilla, nothing against OMI ZSH, it was actually what kind of got me into the whole world.

But since then I've gone to a more vanilla, nothing against OMIZSH, it was actually what kind of got me into the whole world, but since then I've gone to a more vanilla setup and really enjoyed the power behind those completion scripts. I think you're the one that got me into most of that too. I do enjoy it. I'm groping my way along as I go. Yeah, I started with OMIZSH and I started with

Janus for Vim and I've jettisoned both of them recently and kind of rolled my own based on Holman's.files which we've featured up on.files.github.com if you haven't seen that. I follow Octodots on Twitter, where if you're interested in getting into the whole.file space, we're trying to make it easy and give people kind of an on-ramp to that whole world. Because I know coming from a.NET background, I was, if it didn't have a gui i couldn't do it and now i've seen the power of unix and just lament uh how much i wasted my youth on windows platform yeah sorry about that i was like for scope that's all i got

to say about that my phone was ringing right there so iump, that's all I got to say about that. My phone was ringing right there. I'm new at this. I'm trying to figure out what to do. Not a problem. Up next, Sexton, view your Rails routes without waiting on rake. That's a nice segue. In Rails now, if you want to view your routes files, I guess the only way to do that is to run rake routes,

and that's in text modes in the terminal. And if you're looking for a particular one, you can pipe that to grip or something like that. Friend of the show, Richard Schneeman down in Austin works at Heroku has written sextant and it's basically a plugin for rails, just a gem that you install that allows you to see your routes directly in the browser. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

I think that using tools like this, I guess it's kind of the opposite of text mode. So it's taking you to the browser to see what you're doing. One of the things that I think is cool about this, I tend to, there are a few things like the get help pages where I tend to want to see them in a browser just because of the layout and the formatting structure. And I think this is one of them. Depending on how wide your terminal window is, sometimes if one line of these routes gets messed up,

it can really, really confuse you when you're trying to figure out what any of the routes are. So I love this project. I love seeing these routes in the browser, and I always see them formatted correctly. And it just has made it a lot easier for me to figure out what the heck I'm trying to do. That's a good point. If you've got really deeply nested resources, those get kind of wide, and the output in Rake's not that great. It looks like in the screenshot that he's kind of reproducing that output and putting it directly in the browser, but on the web you've got so many more presentation options, hopefully, can solve some of those problems with wrapping,

because it gets kind of hard to see what lines up with what. Yeah, I believe it's actually a horizontally scrolling div that these are wrapped in. So I think, if I'm not mistaken, that I had that problem, and I brought them up in the browser, and I was very, very pleasantly surprised to see that I didn't totally mess up the whole formatting just because of a skinny window. One of the most popular projects of the last few weeks and a couple of months on the changelog has been RubyMotion. Episode 082 was just off the charts in reception. And all the credit there goes to Laurent and just the project that he's created.

But some side projects, I guess community projects, have sprung up around RubyMotion. And one of those that was quite popular was, other than the RubyMotion toolchain open sourcing that we talked about on the show, was the RubyMotion samples. Have you played around much with RubyMotion yet? I haven't. I've watched the Pragmatic Programmers video, and I've just kind of been following the community, listening to Sam talk about it, Sam Soft's talk about it.

It does seem like it's kind of like the solution that everybody's looking for. It still has some growing to do, I think. Or at least Rubyists. For Rubyists, yeah. I think it still has some growing to do. And if you talk to Laurent, I think he would kind of say the same thing. But even just seeing the popularity of this thing explode

ever since it released, and if you just go to the website to look at the project, you can see that there's more effort being put into the website around the project. It seems like the customer support options have increased. And so it does seem like it's just exploding. And rightfully so. I mean, I've heard very good things about it.

Some other projects I've been keeping an eye on, I don't think we've posted the change I'll get. Form Motion was another one that allows you to do forms in Ruby Motion pretty easily. I'll be sure to put that in the show notes. But there's all of these community source projects that are cropping up to make it even easier to build Ruby apps inside of RubyMotion, or I guess iOS apps inside of RubyMotion. Yeah, I think that it'll just continue to go that way too.

I mean, this is, to a Rubyist, not having to go into a language like Objective-C to do this, I think will just continue to grow. And so I think we'll continue to see the community grow around it. I believe, isn't there a similar to the RubyGems environment? Isn't there something similar to that for the Ruby motion? There's CocoaPods, so you can kind of mix and match between Ruby gems and then CocoaPods allows you to pull in iOS frameworks.

And we talked to Alloy about that. Alloy on Twitter, his name's Alloy. It's A-L-L-O-Y on the Twitter. Yeah, and there's also the bubble wrap one that we've covered on the changelog, which it seems to be, you know, they're trying to directly basically map every Cocoa wrapper to a Ruby syntax.

Yeah, some syntactical sugar for a lot of the Cocoa frameworks. It's another community project. It's distributed as a Ruby gem. So you just gem install, bubble wrap, and then you get things like some UI helpers and camera helpers and location helpers built right in. Pretty cool stuff. And there are specific, you can use Ruby gems with RubyMotion, right? But there are just some specific do's and don'ts when you're doing that.

Yeah, I believe that's right. I'm not sure what they are off the top of my head, but I think that I heard Laurent say that actually in the episode. Stay with the iOS theme. Cupertino is another one from Matt Thompson. Matt with three Ts on the Twitter. It's basically a command line, back to text mode, command line interface for the Apple Dev Center. So I know a lot of times when I've had to do tasks in the Apple Dev Center for getting certs and keys and all of that sort of thing.

It's just been, it's just a GUI-based nightmare for me trying to navigate my way through that whole portal. This takes it down to the command line so you can automate a lot of those things, kind of a Thor or rake style interface yeah i don't know i didn't know if that was just me or not but it seems like trying to figure out how to build a xcode project on my ipad was one of the most difficult things i ever did oh i know i didn't understand i mean and then to do it on a second computer was even harder.

And that was the way that they're handling their certificates and keys. And it seems like this kind of a project is really going to make that a lot easier, which I would be glad to use on my next iOS project. But yeah, that is an area where, you know, I don't, many people don't have too much bad to say about Apple, but that's probably one of them where they could really use some, some, uh, put some of their bright minds behind it just to make that process easier. I don't know if it's difficult by design or what, but yeah, when you, you build your first iOS app, even if it's a hello world app and you want to see it actually run on the device and outside of the simulator, you know, it's kind of opaque, the process to, especially if you're

in a team-based environment, to get the right device IDs into the right provisioning profile and all of that cocktail mixed up to be able to sign the app and put it on your device. Yeah, and if you're working with a team that's specifically, you know, an external team that you are just kind of helping out with, then it's kind of a big process to get added to that team and then to be removed from that team, you know, if that happens. So yeah, Cupertino definitely seems like it is going to aim to solve those problems. And for me, doing any of that at the command line means it will be easier to do so i will welcome that with open arms switching gears over to the html5 area for a minute

grunt i believe this is one of yours yeah so grunt um i'd used it in the past but not too heavily uh just basically gives you the ability to run command line tasks in your JavaScript environment. Very, very useful project. You can use it to test your code quality. You can use it to concatenate files. You can use it to do a lot of things. But it's like a, I'm not sure what to compare it to, but there is a whole community growing up around this tool, and plug-ins are being written for it for different environments. But I think the ones that are kind of just the standard ones are the JavaScript Lint

and QUnit, Minify, stuff like that. But it's a very neat project, and if you haven't used it in any of your JavaScript projects that could use some automation, I highly recommend trying it. It was very easy to get started with, and wrapping your head around it can be difficult at first, but once you get it, you definitely see the benefits of it. So yeah, I enjoyed writing that up. And I think this was actually one of the ones that I heard from quite a few people. As soon as I posted this article for Grunt, I heard from quite a few people that are like, hey, you know, I wrote this tool for this plugin for Grunt, consider covering this. And I think that that is the goal. I think we kind of want to compile a list of a bunch of different useful plugins, but it does seem to have its own little community growing up around it. So definitely something worth checking out.

We need a way to post multiple repos in the same changelog article, maybe something we can whip up soon instead of being a one-for-one deal. It'd be nice to have a topic and then embed three or four, especially if it's a plugin parent-child type of relationship like this. Yeah, absolutely. So staying with the HTML5 theme, Pro is a content editor for GitHub. You're drawing a blank

because you don't remember this project at all, do you? I do, but I'm thinking of Impress. I'm going to bring it up real quick. This is the one. It's basically Jekyll in the Sky. Host your blog on Jekyll, but it gives you a nice editor to edit content. Oh, yes, yes, yes. So basically, Prose, very cool project, actually.

And you can use it to edit anything. It's more or less a front end for editing any kind of a file on GitHub, any kind of a text file on GitHub. But I think the goal is to kind of help you to basically create a Jekyll site and be able to edit that in their environment. Very neat, very beautiful interface. Actually, when you start to see some of these projects, you see that a lot of interfaces kind of go in the same direction and a lot of stuff starts to look very similar because it's what's popular. And when I first saw Prose, I remember thinking that it just seemed fresh. Very beautiful interface, very well done. It took me just a few minutes to get involved and they actually imported my projects in from GitHub, and I was able to kind of browse the files and edit the different pieces of files.

I think the only thing I really tried was editing a readme. But, I mean, you've used Jekyll. You've used Jekyll. I've never used it. You've used it, I think, for your winnetherland.com, if I'm not mistaken. I tried it back in the day, and there's Octopress on top of that. I'm a Nesta CMS fan right now. I've been using that lately.

But, yeah, I love static website generators in general, and this kind of gives you the best of both worlds. The downside of doing the static thing with getting GitHub, while it's geek-friendly, if you've got non-geeks that want to contribute, it's kind of hard to sometimes to give them the overhead of the Git workflow. This would allow you to have less

technically inclined people on your team be able to contribute. Yeah. I think that there's definitely hope. We actually recently got some designers who had never used version control to wrap their head around GitHub, and the GitHub for Mac client made it very easy for them.

So I think that there's definitely hope, and it's going to keep growing, and adoption will probably keep growing. So, yeah, but if you haven't used Prose or if you're looking for kind of an online editor for a blog or a static site. Just even while it's not specifically suited for doing any kind of code markup editing, it's definitely worth checking out. Mousetrap.js. Another plug-in. Yeah, so Mousetrap is basically, again, most of these, especially with the JavaScript articles, these are ones that I've used personally that have made my life a lot easier. So I just kind of wanted to share that.

But Mousetrap basically makes it easy to do keyboard shortcuts. Craig Campbell, who was the author behind, was it Rainbow, I think? Yeah, Craig Campbell, one of the authors behind Rainbow, or the author behind Rainbow, actually wrote this very small little library and basically it just makes handling JavaScript shortcuts easy. And it handles sequences and it handles key combinations. It's

similar to if you're used to the Gmail sequences. It's very, very easy to do. Very easy to use. I love the Gmail sequences. Oh yeah, I mean that's they're kind of pioneers in that little world It's very, very easy to do, very easy to use. I love the Gmail sequences. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're kind of pioneers in that little world. So to see other, it's becoming easy to use that stuff in any website. Very exciting.

What I liked about this one is the syntax. There's no futzing around with character codes and modifier keys and all of that stuff. You pretty much express them in a string just like you would want to capture them. So G space I captures G and then I. Like in Gmail and Command Shift K, if you want to actually, you don't have to worry about what the codes are for any of those keys, which makes it very developer friendly. Speaking of Gmail shortcuts, I don't use the web interface

since they totally whitewashed it beyond all use for me. I switched over to Sparrow about the same time, which I'm saddened to find this week is getting sucked into the Google Borg no longer to be updated. Yeah, it sounded like they're only going to be releasing maintenance releases for Sparrow. But have you ever used the Gmail client on your iPhone? I have. And it definitely leaves a lot to be desired. And I think Sparrow can maybe bring some of that expertise in there to help out with some of the interfaces for that stuff. So you never know.

I mean, I read an article that basically said we might, for the first time ever see an actual native Gmail client for your Mac too. So we'll see. I would love, you know, some of this talent acquisitions. They do be a little bit, uh, I guess more defined and that the pro the products that they're acquiring surface, you know, under the Google brand and not just get sucked up and disappear forever. There's been a lot of tools that I've used over the years. I know PageRank was one of those that I loved for measuring social analytics. And our buddy Ilya got acquired by Google, and they've got some of those features now built into Google Analytics.

But I'm not so sure that when it happens that way, if the end result is always as strong as kind of a separate offering that they had going in. Yeah, it does kind of seem like they pull in a product and then take the team from that product and apply it to the core team rather than, you know, continuing a product or developing a new product. So sometimes it's almost hard to figure out where they went or even if they're still with the company. The web interface for Gmail, I just cannot explain it. It was one of those things where it wasn't the prettiest thing in the world, but it was so darn usable that everybody loved it. And now it's just, there's such an incredible lack of contrast in the thing that I just can't even use it.

I think the Gmail one specifically is bad because when they've redesigned everything, I liked most of the stuff. I like a lot of the redesigns even for the newer version of Google Plus and the newer Google Docs and that stuff. I actually enjoy that. But yeah, it does seem like specifically in Gmail it kind of missed. Notice Rdio came out with a similar redesign where they whitewashed pretty much the whole thing. They had a very iTunes type of design, and now I guess it's been over a month ago they came out with just this very, very stark white interface. The first time I fired it up after the update that morning, it was just my office, which I normally like natural light, and I've got the overhead light off until...

I just prefer the natural light instead of the overhead light. My whole office lit up with just this big bright screen from from the rdo interface i'm not sure if you're an rdo user but uh in the last couple of days they've been inching a little bit more contrast and color back into that thing yeah i actually am an rdo user and the when they updated it to the new interface um well first i felt like you know when you in those old movies not old movies but where you're watching the computer hackers and they're sitting in front of their computer screen in the dark room and their whole face is little blue because, you know, that's that's like how computer hacking apparently works. It kind of had that feeling for me, too. I just my whole face lit up white.

And why is it that movies do that? If you're on a computer and you're hacking, CSI does this all the time. I catch a lot of the CSI reruns. They work in this crime lab. And I don't know if they always work the night shift, but there's never any lights on in this whole place. And everything's like black lights and blue underneath the counter lights. Hollywood. Yeah.

Well, no, that's what we do, right? I mean, we lock ourselves in basements with eight liter bottles of Mountain Dew and don't come out for five days. I'd love to pay somebody from Hollywood to outfit my office with what they think the hacker's office would look like. Yeah, actually with RDO, the other thing was when I loaded it up after the install, I thought there must have been a background image that didn't come up or something. Broken style sheet? Yeah, it seemed like something was broken, and it does seem like they're inching some of that contrast back in. I would encourage them to keep going that direction

because when Spotify and RDO were kind of competing for my business, the interface was the big thing that kept me on RDO. And I'm not gonna tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do with their company, but I definitely liked it before a little bit more. To do NBC. So for some reason, every JavaScript framework out there, the canonical example is to create a to do list manager.

And so Addy has created to do NBC. This is one of the ones you posted. Yeah, so I just seemed to notice maybe even a year ago that the de facto standard example application was always a todo. And I don't know where that started for these single-page JavaScript frameworks, but it just seemed like that's kind of where it took off. So it seems like Addy, very, you know, obviously if you haven't heard of him, he's a very well-known JavaScript guru. But it seemed like, you know, if they're going to kind of start to approach it from that direction, let's just pull them all into one place and make it very easy to see them all and to use them all and to see how they work. And a neat little project.

I mean, not, you know, this isn't the open source project in the same sense that we usually like to cover it, but it is open source code and just kind of a lot of examples. I think last I checked there was like low 20s of projects that are currently in progress. One of the questions I get asked all the time is, how can I get started in open source? I asked that question myself to some of the guys from ThoughtBot just a few years ago. How do you get started? I mean, I feel like I have a little bit of skill in coding, but I'm not well-known, so how do I get started?

And this is a great example of a launching pad if you need one. They have, you know, 23 projects that are in progress, and they're more than willing to bring you on to help out with those projects. They're also very excited if there's another framework that you're aware of that's not currently in the project. You know, it's just a neat little place to get your feet wet and start to help out with some of these. But yeah, it's an interesting little project, and you'll see just a lot of different flavors of JavaScript frameworks if you jump into it. One of the great things you can do is jump into a project and contribute. Go to the issues list.

See what bugs have been filed. See if you can submit a patch with tests, preferably. And the more you tune your ear to problems and kind of turn that around into opportunity it's really easy to uh to jump in and contribute to a project just because there's way more um i guess complaints a lot of time than there is praise so uh you So as a maintainer of several projects, I'm always ecstatic when I get a patch and it includes a fix for something that's broken and has tests to boot.

And you specifically love it when it's your Ruby gems and it has a version bump in it, right? Please don't touch my version file. Don't touch the gem spec. Don't touch the version file. But, you know, that's you bring up a good point. Look at the readme and look at the contribution guidelines. And some projects don't take patches. There's just certain protocols around each little community. But for the most part, if it's a bun, get out. People are begging for your codes. Yeah, and speaking of contribution guidelines, if the project you're looking at does not have them specifically, just look at the code and follow the same stuff that everyone else is doing. But yeah, this is a, to do MVC,

a great place to kind of get involved if you're trying to figure out. And I would encourage you to, you know, no matter how good you feel you are as a developer, one of the great things about the open source world is that people working in open source tend to be very open about helping and open about helping to get you started. So just jump in and start doing stuff, and you'll start to kind of figure out where you like to work, where you like to help out, and then where you're needed.

And that's one of the questions that I've tried to start asking the articles that I write up. The articles that I'm writing up, I've tried to start asking the authors of those projects, where is a good place for somebody to get involved? And it's interesting to hear the responses because generally speaking, again, with the open source world, people like, they just kind of say,

we're looking for people to test it for bug fixes, for new features. But what we really want is just to get in GitHub, look at the issues and see what people are talking about. And that's the perfect place to kind of jump in and start helping out. Absolutely. Let's end on one that's a bit lighter. Don't get blame me, I was pairing a T-shirt. So I sent out a tweet, a free T-shirt idea with that as the slogan. Teespring picked that up and turned it into a product. Over 80 of us bought it.

And I appreciate those of you that helped out with that. Mine came in the mail a couple of weeks ago. It fits great. American Apparel. And I'll probably be sporting that at a conference near you pretty soon. Yeah, I actually bought, I think two of my favorite T-shirts in the last six months

have been the Don't Get Blamed Me T-shirt and the Cheddar T-shirt. I have both of them and I wear them quite often. So I guess that is the nerdy computer hacker part of me that we were talking about. But, yes, it's neat to get, especially when they're high-quality T-shirts from American Apparel. Absolutely. Not some of the other, you know, some of their competition is a lot heavier, thicker.

Yeah, I like them. Cheddar is Cheddar app, Sam's to-do list in the sky, but powered by Push. So all of your devices are instantaneously updated whenever you update the website and vice versa, which is pretty cool. Yeah, ironically, I'm not sure if you saw my tweet last week where I spelled cheese in my Cheddar shirt. I did not see that. Oh, the irony was painful. Do you know where the name Cheddar even came from? I mean, I just assume it was kind of, I think he's a burger enthusiast, so I just assume it came from, I don't know. I don't know.

We'll have to ask Sam on a future show. Yeah. Well, thanks, Andrew, for joining us and popping the cork on this first edition of the wrap-up this year. Yeah, no problem. I really enjoyed it. It's a lot of fun.