bgror

Want it? Give. »

Created at: 10.04.2010 09:15, source: The Life Of A Radar, tagged: Uncategorized

Imagine this scenario. You’re waiting at a checkout at your supermarket. It’s a pretty long line, compared to your past experiences.

Directly in front of you there’s a 22-year-old guy with medium-length hair, listening to God-knows-what on his earphones, dressed in casual gear. Probably middle class.

In front of him there’s another guy, about mid thirties, wearing a “business suit”; black pants, white top and tie. Probably upper class.

Then in front of him there’s a woman, probably around the same age as the man, but dressed like a hippie. She’s got a shirt that says “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″. You fondly remember giggling quietly to yourself the first time you saw this shirt.

Then of course there’s the cashier. Unusually, it’s a guy with a ponytail who looks like the kind who you’d see attending computer and anime conventions.

The lady at the front of the queue puts her goods on the belt and the cashier processes them. Status quo. Then when the lady hands over the money, the cashier’s drawer breaks and falls out. Money goes everywhere. Coins roll in every which direction.

Now what the fuck do you do? Do you sit back and let the cashier run about collecting up his coins or do you help out?

Well, in this analogy, you sit back and let the cashier do it all. All of you in the queue do. Nobody helps the poor cashier.

You useless, pathetic bastards.

Now imagine this scenario wasn’t a checkout line. Imagine the people in the checkout line are actually people in an open source project’s community. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re waiting for The Next Big Release for this open source project. Imagine instead of the cashier’s drawer dropping out and throwing coins like shrapnel from a frag grenade, it’s actually tickets for this open source project. Do you know of a project like this?

I do.

It’s called Ruby on Rails. And it’s suffering because of your ignorance. It is at the moment in a place which I will steal the term “Development Hell” for and use. At current writing it has over 900 open tickets. Let me state that again because it is such a pertinent fact: There are over 900 tickets still open. So what the fuck are you going to do about it?

One little piece

It’s great that (at least in this Western world) we have things called weekends. We also have time where we are not working. Some of us have (a lot) more of it than others and generally waste it playing video games or watching TV. I’m fine with that, but there is a limit I feel before it turns from “relaxing” into “slacking off”. You have to realise that you are part of a world-wide community. You are using something developed by people world wide and it is time that you gave back.

I am sure that many of you reading this will think “I don’t know enough about Rails to do anything with any of the tickets.”

Bullshit. Fucking bullshit.

Take this ticket for instance. Guy experiences hassles with rake doc:rails on Ruby 1.9.2 and edge Rails. How do you go about fixing something like that? Well, here’s that god-damned clue you’ve been missing:

• Attempt to duplicate it. People make mistakes, because they are people. Can you see what they did wrong? Is the bug still occurring in the latest (at this point in time, 2.3.5 & 3.0.0, yes, test both!)
• If something is broken, attempt to fix it. This continues onto my third point:
• Fix it! This is the most simplest, basic, elementary thing. You know the saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” the reverse applies. Fix the ever-loving shit of it.
• Can’t fix it? Find somebody who can. They exist. There’s a great probability that the problem is not as unsolvable as certain other problems in this world.
• Can’t find somebody? You’re not looking hard enough. Ask in the IRC channels on irc.freenode.net. Ask in #carlhuda. Ask in #rubyonrails. Ask in #rails-contrib. Ask your friends. Post on the core mailing list. Six-degrees of separation means that you have the power to find somebody with the power to fix this issue.
• Is this ticket no longer valid? Assign it to somebody who can close it. I’m now one of these people. Assign it to me and I’ll look over it.

Another thing to look at is how long the ticket has been a problem for and if it still applies to the latest version of Rails. Take for example this ticket which has been a problem since the 9th of January last year, when Rails 2.2 was the latest version. It’s still a problem in Rails 3, and this means it needs to be fixed. If one guy is suffering, how many other people who have not seen that ticket are? We must go through and judge every ticket before a major release. If I was in charge of a release process, this is how I would run the show. When I release a major version of my project, I want a clean slate, well, at least no bugs. Admittedly there may be some people who miss out on feature requests, but that’s what future releases are for.

Pissing on the fire

I think the Bugmash events are freakin’ awesome. But they only “piss on the fire”. What we need is a concentrated stream (think Amazon River) to quell the beast of 900+ tickets. Donate some of your time to the Rails project. Spend a concerted amount of your spare time this week, and next week, and the week after that, going through the tickets and finding something you can help fix. Every little bit of effort helps.

The Rails core team has only so much effort it can apply in any given timeframe, how about applying some of your own to speed up the process of bringing us closer to a final Rails 3 release?

I ask you, not as a Ruby on Rails core member (clarification: I’m not, nor desire to ever be “core”), but as a fellow Rails guy: let’s keep this Rails beast alive and kicking. Take some time out of watching your porn and actually do something useful. Otherwise, you are just another leech hanging on the side and whining about “it’s been so long between releases”. Did you ever stop to think that: “maybe there’s something holding up the release?” or “maybe there’s something holding up the release that I can help with?”.

Give back to the community that has provided this wonderful framework for your benefit.

Please.

Extra

Dan Pickett also has similar advice on contributing back to Rails 3. He makes a good point that if you are able to demonstrate that you have contributed to Rails that it looks awesome on your CV / Resume.

Greetings YCombinator people!. Thanks for making this story one of your favourites (peaked at #4). I have commented on your comments left on YCombinator and I appreciate the time you have spent writing them. I look forward to keeping up the correspondence.

When Rails 3 is Due »

Created at: 05.04.2010 05:51, source: The Life Of A Radar, tagged: Uncategorized

As a person who hangs out in #rubyonrails on Freenode a little too much of his spare time, I eventually come across repeated questions. This is why I made the channel bot which runs on Summer.

One of the hardest frequently asked question is “When is Rails 3 due?”

To be honest I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure not even Rails Core knows precisely when it’s due. Sure, they’ll have some kind of idea of when they’d like it to be released but it’s a very similar idea to mine of wanting to be rich (i.e. right now). Ideas and realities are two entirely separate worlds.

On the 1st of April, Rails 3.0.0beta2 was announced by DHH. This announcement came very nearly two whole months after first Rails 3 beta announcement.

So why so long between releases? Well, lets go time traveling.

We travel back, back through time and its murk. We land spot bang in the middle of March 28, 2006. It’s on this day that a slightly-younger version of DHH announces Rails 1.1. Oh look it has RJS. How young and foolish we all were. By we, I mean you guys of course, this was at least 3 months before I even begun getting into Rails. So Rails 1.1 was born into the world on March 28th, 2006. Right then. What about the next significant version?

The next version would be Rails 1.2, let’s jump forward to the first Rails 1.2 Release Candidate on November 23rd, 2006. This is a distance of ~20,735,982 seconds (or in more sensible terms: 7 months and 27 days) between a major release (1.1) and a the next major release’s (1.2) release candidate. Ok, so when was the next release candidate?

That would be the second Rails 1.2 release candidate. Somewhere between these two releases I joined the Rails fray. The distance between releases? ~3,715,200 (or in more sensible terms: 1 month and 13 days). They really didn’t waste much time getting this out the door, and with so many changes too! Next!

So with the release candidates out of the way DHH announces Rails 1.2. This was a mere 17 days (~1,468,800 seconds in the “old money”) between release candidate and major release. 17 days (not a pattern) later, Rails 1.2.2 is announced. On Pi day in 2007, 36 days after Rails 1.2.2 is released, Rails 1.2.3 is released. Then nothing happens for a while.

During the 30th September, 2007 A Rails 2.0.0 Preview Release is announced. Surely the 2.0 release has to be close, right?

Between the 2.0 release postings, on the 5th of October, 2007, 6 months and 19 days after Rails 1.2.3 is released, Rails 1.2.4 comes out. Then a mere week later, Rails 1.2.5 is announced and released. Rails 2 work continued through these releases, as indicated by a Rails 2 release candidate announcement in the midst of November 2007. Rails 1.2.6 was announced 1 month and 12 days after Rails 1.2.5 was. This was to be the final version 1 release before Rails 2.

On December 7th, 2007, Rails 2.0 was released much to the joy of the Rails world. 10 days later Rails 2.0.2 comes out with “some new defaults and a few fixes”. Then nothing happens for a while, again.

Then Rails 2.1 came out, on the 1st of June, 2008, 5 months and 23 days later.

Some more patch releases were made after the Rails 2.1 release. The 3rd of September is when Rails 2.0.4, the first patch release is announced, 3 months and 2 days later. On the 19th October, 2008, another patch release Rails 2.0.5 is released. This is 1 month and 16 days since the previous patch release.

Rails 2.1.1 was released 3 months and 4 days after the Rails 2.1.0 announcement with “lots of bug fixes”. It seems they didn’t quite fix all the bugs as Rails 2.1.2 was released 1 month and 18 days later. The next minor release wasn’t far off, only 28 days, and that one was Rails 2.2.

It is important to note that it is around this point in time that the Merb + Rails merger is announced on the 23rd December, 2008. This merge would grow into what we will soon know as Rails 3.

The next minor release after that was the Rails 2.3 announcement, 3 months and 24 days later on the 16th March, 2009, the first release of 2009. The next announced release occurred on the 20th July, 2009: Rails 2.3.3. Some security fixes are announced, making Rails 2.3.4 a reality 1 month and 15 days after the Rails 2.3.3 announcement.

Then we get to the most recent stable version of Rails: Rails 2.3.5. This was released a total of 2 months and 26 days after Rails 2.3.4.

Now most recently, the Rails 3 betas. The first was announced on the 5th Feburary 2010, 2 months and 5 days after Rails 2.3.5 was released, which doesn’t mean much. What’s a more relevant statistic would be that it was released 1 year, 1 month and 14 days after the Rails + Merb merge was announced. The beta was a very large and sweeping change of just about everything in Rails, afterall, this is a major release. There is going to be some major differences.

Finally, Rails 3 beta 2, announced on April fools day, 1 month and 25 days after the first beta release. DHH says that this release is “hopefully our last stop before a release candidate” but again: nobody knows. There may be another beta released.

Once you know the release candidate goes out you’ll know there’ll be a huge hubbub of how momentous the ocassion is. I say everyone deserves a “huge round of applause”. Or the internet equivalent. The amount of work put in Rails 3 over the last year and a bit is tremendous. Then people can finally start (or continue, in some cases) migrating their plugins and gems over to Rails. Personally, I look forward to the day where I can begin a new Rails application using compatible versions of Cucumber and RSpec and the latest and greatest Rails 3 code.

God speed, gentlemen.

Edit

It’s rare that I edit posts after they’ve been written but I feel I need to clarify here. This post is not intended to give a solid or even a vague guess at what the Rails 3 release date is going to be. If you want my personal opinion it’s going to be another 2 to 4 weeks before a release candidate. Pure, utter, guesswork based on observation. The regression tickets themselves do not seem overly complex and if they are the only thing in the way of a release candidate then I cannot see there being any major delay.

Not staying in Scotland »

Created at: 01.04.2010 13:44, source: The Life Of A Radar, tagged: Uncategorized

So I posted earlier that I got offered a job in Scotland and was staying for a couple of weeks. (Un?)fortunately this is not the case. As of this writing I’m sitting very close to Changi Airport’s C23 in the “Laptop Access” area they have here getting my internet fix after a 12-and-a-half hour flight. Sitting in a middle seat. Scotland is a fantastic country and one day I may go back to visit it but for now my home is Sydney, closely followed by Brisbane. If something comes up that is irresistible then perhaps I will move elsewhere, but there are still plenty of opportunities in Australia for me and moving is such a ginormous pain in the ass. If I did move out of the country it’s more than likely I would have to sell everything I own and start afresh, a prospect I do not look forward to. I simply have too much crap, and I’m only 22.

So in summary: Staying in Sydney, not Scotland. Catch up with you all when I get the chance :)

Staying in Scotland »

Created at: 31.03.2010 16:59, source: The Life Of A Radar, tagged: Uncategorized

This past week I attended the Scottish Ruby Conference and for the week prior I was experiencing the joy that is Scotland. I have made a decision to stay on a couple of weeks and I apologise for those who I haven’t yet discussed this with.

Since the conference, I have been discussions with one of the local companies who wish to hire me to teach Ruby after my contract with GetUp has expired. I’m going to their offices in Edinburgh today for a meeting to discuss this. I think they’re fantastic people and it would be almost as much joy to work with them as it has been to work with GetUp and I would name them if it wasn’t for a damn NDA. GetUp’s going to be exceptionally hard to beat.

I may return to Australia to collect some things and put my affairs in order eventually, but Scotland just feels like the right place to be at the moment. It’s much closer to a larger number of countries than Australia with greater opportunities in the Ruby & Rails sectors and I love everything here.

Later on today I will contact GetUp and let them know that I’m still willing to do work for them, albeit remotely, and I hope they will understand.

More on this later. See you then!

$100k Raised in Three Days—Way to Go, Ruby! »

Created at: 30.03.2010 00:55, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized

Last week, we announced the Ruby Summer of Code campaign; we were working with the folks over at Ruby Central and the Ruby on Rails core team to raise money to fund student open source projects. We had high hopes for the program, and for the support the community would provide, but this one just blew our minds!

The campaign began Wednesday morning, and by Friday night, we’d hit our ambitious goal of raising $100,000. With support from numerous Ruby and Rails companies as sponsors, as well as individual donations from Rubyists all over the world, we’re now able to fund an astonishing twenty open source Ruby and Rails projects this summer.

The project is currently accepting mentor applications through April 2nd, and the student application period will be open from April 5th to April 23rd. With so many slots, this summer is sure to be one of tremendous progress.

Thanks to all those who joined us in funding this great open source cause; there’s nothing else quite like the Ruby community.