This is a big day in the Ruby open source community. Some may reflect back on this day and wonder which had more impact: Ruby on Rails, or Progression?
Just kidding. Progression is a simple Ruby progress bar I wrote because I thought it would be an interesting challenge to publish a non-trivial RubyGem. You can learn more here.
Publishing my first gem
Green-fielding a project is enjoyable because you get to make every decision. Working solo was mildly intoxicating as well; I had nobody to get mad at me if I force-pushed to master. Both starting a new project from scratch and being the sole maintainer were nice changes of pace from my day job. I also found publishing the gem itself to be a very pleasant process.
What I learned
I learned that good code takes time. As it stands now, I don’t think the code in Progression is anywhere near perfect. It’s also hardly tested - I opted for constantly running the bin/demo instead. It’s also fairly barebones, but I wanted to just ship it before adding any more features.
Why?
Because it was fun. I will be publishing more gems in the future - possibly committing to publishing a gem a month as a new-years resolution. I feel like that would make me grow a lot. I got a brief taste of what it is like to write open-source software other people might use, and I really enjoyed it.