Re-finding my rubyligion ...

Life’s been busy. Good, but busy. My gig at LinkedIn, two hours of commuting each day, plus our four person plus dog family certainly keeps me awash in things I should be doing. Thing is, ever since I stepped away from managing LinkedIn’s rubyists, I haven’t had much to keep me practicing my Ruby skills or tied to the Ruby community. That’s made me a bit sad.

So, for the last few months, I’ve been finding spare-time, non-urgent Ruby projects on github to play with, forking them when I’m ready to make contributions. The one I’m currently twiddling most is a fork of Jon Maddox’s IMDB library. He got the very basics in to deal with movies; I’m expanding it to handle TV series and episodes as well. In the process, I’ve added testing and some heavy refactoring, mostly to arrange the libraries in a more idiomatic fashion but also to swap out Hpricot for Nokogiri (sorry, why, but Nokogiri has better support for complex XPath and XSLT fun that simplifies some of the code dramatically).

I’m also digging into the guts of the Confluence4R and Jira4R libraries (and I am gratefully indebted to Ben Walding for setting up a github mirror of the Jira4R main git repo at Codehaus); for them, I’m mostly adding spec code to demonstrate what I think is true as I’m learning. Jira4R is driving me a bit nuts – I’m having a love/hate relationship with its wsdl2ruby underpinnings. Slowly I learn.

But, then, that’s the point, isn’t it?