Maintaining A Gem

Thoughts and guidelines on maintaining a Ruby gem.

Presented to DCRug on 3/10/16.

Transcript

1. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING STEVEN DANIELS
2. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING WHY MAINTAIN A GEM ▸ Improves the ecosystem ▸ Self-improvement ▸ A different perspective on software ▸ Ruby needs gem maintainers
3. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING WHAT DOES A GEM MAINTAINER DO?
4. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING WHAT DOES A GEM MAINTAINER DO?
5. HOW DO I GO ABOUT MAINTAINING A GEM? Me in early 2015 MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING
6. BECOME
 AN OPEN SOURCE GARDENER
7. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING ROO BEFORE ▸ ~ 50 issues ▸ 10+ open pull requests ▸ No gem updates in 14+ months ▸ Thousands of tests and specs ▸ Previous maintainer MIA ▸ Repo maintainer could not publish to Rubygems.
8. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING ROO AFTER ▸ Helped transition to new maintainers. ▸ Reduced gem size from 1.8MB to 64K. ▸ Didn't break stuff (too much). ▸ Issues < 10
9. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING GUIDELINES FOR WORKING GEMS: FOSTER COMMUNITY ▸ Be respectful ▸ Read every issue ▸ Ask permission ▸ Don't rant ▸ Make contributing easy
10. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING GUIDELINES FOR MAINTAINING A GEM: USE BEST PRACTICES ▸ Keep a Changelog. (Git history is not a Changelog.) ▸ Use Continuous Integration (CI) and code quality tools. ▸ Follow Semver ▸ Don't break people's code ▸ Use an ISSUES_TEMPLATE ▸ Use Readme Chicklets
14. MAINTAINING A GEM, OR EXPERIMENTS IN GEM GARDENING RESOURCES ▸ http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open- source-gardener ▸ https://github.com/roo-rb/roo ▸ http://keepachangelog.com ▸ http://semver.org/ ▸ http://shields.io/