Open Source contributions from the LLP team
by John Cieślik-Bridgen 31 August 2010
We're big believers in the Open Source movement, and encourage our team members to contribute to projects that interest them, as well as rewarding and recognising those who do so with our "Kudos" system.
Our company's main Open Source project is RubyTime - a time tracking and invoicing system that is being used by customers all over the world. The simplest benefit of this is that we feel great about saving other people time in re-inventing timesheet shaped-wheels! But the project also benefits us in various more subtle ways - for a start, it showcases how we believe Ruby should be written. In that sense it serves a marketing purpose and allows potential clients to empirically evaluate us. We also intend for it to be an ideal application for someone who wants to experiment with Ruby, and that way encourage more people to try our favourite language and web framework. Whilst RubyTime has been around since 2005, we've some more contemporary examples of Open Source work represented by the addons for this project: namely an iPhone client, and RubyTime plasmoid - a widget for KDE4’s Plasma widget engine. We've other software that we've released to the world available in our public GitHub repository.
In terms of the individuals here who are involved in Open Source projects, here are some of our recent contributions:
Krzysztof Knapik: Krzysiek is a contributor to Rails i18n, who has won praise for his improvements to this gem. He's blogged about some of his work here.
Marcin Kulik: We've seen recently that Marcin's racksh (a console for Rack based ruby web applications) is being used in new Ruby frameworks and the project is followed over 200 github users at the moment. He's also saved time for many of us with OpenFileFast for Netbeans/JEdit, brought a splash of colour to ANSI terminals with his Rainbow gem and improved programming pleasure by creating editor/IDE color scheme converter Coloration. Marcin was also one of the organisers of the CodeRack competition, and spoke on "Building web frameworks with Rack" at Euruko 2010.
Jakub Suder: is the author of MacBlip, and JSLint on Rails, which he's written about on this blog. He has also contributed to EnvJS, BSJSONAdditions (JSON parser for ObjC) and the git extension git-subtree
Bartosz Knapik: Bartosz has released rcov_stats which generates test coverage metrics. This is a plugin that we believe all our clients benefit from, as we mandate its use across all our projects.
Artur Bilski: Artur recently demonstrated to the LLP team a Javascript framework he's been writing. ArtJS is a work in progress, and one that we'll be blogging in more detail about in the future.
When I used to interview programmers, I often got the best feel for the type of person I might be hiring from their technical interests beyond work. Were they the sort of person who was genuinely enthusiastic about internet technologies - or were they content to be a pure nine-to-fiver? The same applies in looking for a vendor - and in fact, we're increasingly asked about any Open Source work we have done by potential clients. In an industry where certifications are often meaningless, we'd rather point you in the direction of code that we've shared with the world, and in so doing, won the respect of the toughest critics of all - our fellow programmers in the Open Source community.