Summary: Panel Nick Quaranto (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Summer Camp) James Edward Gray (blog twitter github) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Discussion Jekyll Rubygems.org Rubyforge github gems Jeweler Tom Preston-Werner (from github.com) gforge a Gems API hoe gemcutter gem push Ruby Inside rubygems Ruby Central bundler module counts gemspec bones rakegems Picks cinch irc bot (James) Skyrim (James) Catherine (James) Addressable URI (Avdi) Johnnie Walker Double Black (Avdi) Gemnasium (Josh) Screaming Monkey (Chuck) The Office (Chuck) showoff.io (Nick) Transcript NICK: I know you guys had an episode where you tore apart the code and I thought that was really cool and weird to listen to. [Laughter] JOSH: We’re going to ask you about your feedback about that on the show. NICK: [Laughs] JOSH: We want you to rate our reading. JAMES: Rate our reading? NICK: A dramatic reading. CHUCK: Hello everybody, and welcome to Episode 36 of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This week on our panel, we have guest Rogue, Nick Quaranto. NICK: Hey ho. CHUCK: Do you want to introduce yourself really quickly? NICK: Sure. I’m Nick, I live in Buffalo, New York. I work for 37Signals and I’ve hacked a lot on RubyGems in RubyGems.org, more than any human should possibly want to. Although not the most, I don’t hold the top banner there. CHUCK: Alright. Well, thanks for joining us. We also have James Edward Gray. JAMES: I’m back. CHUCK: Yeah, it was kind of different without you. JAMES: It was really weird being on the other side. I got to listen to Ruby Rogues as a consumer instead of a producer. CHUCK: [Chuckles] Josh Susser. JOSH: Good morning, folks. CHUCK: Avdi Grimm. AVDI: Hello again. CHUCK: And I’m Charles Max Wood from TeachMeToCode.com. And this week, we’re going to be talking about RubyGems, kind of where it came from and then all the good stuff that surrounds that. So, it was suggested by Josh. So, I’m going to go ahead and let him kind of lead us into this topic. JOSH: Okay, cool. So, RubyGems.org, that’s this website that lets us see what gems are available and it also drives the downloading of RubyGems when you type Gem Install, whatever. So, there’s a whole website there. And Nick is the driving force behind that so we wanted to talk a bit about the history of how that came to be and what it does and what the future is. Does that sound okay? NICK: Yeah. JOSH: Okay. CHUCK: Yeah, but what does RubyGems have to do with anybody programming Ruby really? JOSH: Well, what does it? Somebody tell me. CHUCK: Well, I remember when I first got into the Ruby community and we had, what was it? Rubyforge? And so, I kind of expected collective groans but it did actually work mostly. NICK: I groaned internally for you. [Laughter] CHUCK: So, I’m wondering, what were the issues with Rubyforge that prompted the gemcutter rewrite? NICK: That’s a good question. So, I got into gem publishing around when Jekyll started to get popular and basically, that’s the thing that runs GitHub pages. And I knew nothing of RubyGems. I kind of knew Ruby, I was doing some Rails stuff and I was actually looking for open source projects to contribute to. I actually have a post on Reddit from forever ago that’s like, “I’m in College and I heard this open source thing is cool. What do I do?” And somebody pointed me at Rubinious and I went running the other way as fast as I could. But then, I found Jekyll and I decided to rewrite my blog in it. And from there, I basically knew I had to hack some things into it, I had to hack some features and I found out about gems that way. It was more of like a natural thing, like, “Oh, I need to hack this feature in. How do I do that?
