My current projects have a significant portion of legacy code and lots of gem dependencies. Time to time, I check their Gemfiles just to be puzzled about some of the gems I barely know about. Sooner or later, I will have to check those dependencies to learn if those gems are up to date and still supported — there is a chance I would need to get rid of irrelevant code, especially if it is already outdated.
The same problem arises when you need to add a new dependency to the project or choose a new gem from a myriad of alternatives. It would be great to check the amount of changes going on with the gem, its development history, its changelog and issues — on GitHub or RubyGems — and do it all at once while comparing it to alternatives.
I am going to share some interesting infographics on trends and development history of some of the most well-known Ruby projects (hanami, slim, minitest and others), will talk about the aspects of getting the metrics from the sources mentioned above, and, most of all, about several ways to classify that data. Also, of course, we are going to have a demo of the project which was born as a result of my research; it will be available as an open-source project.