As you might have noticed a big project I’ve been working on for almost 2 years got its first release on the 10th of May a bit more than 2 weeks ago. You can go read the official release announcement. This one is a bit more personal 😉
JAY A RELEASE!!!!
It’s been a long road from the 24th of May 2012 when the shoes community got together to concentrate efforts on the complete rewrite we call shoes4 now. That is a long time. It’s a time in which we made more than 2000 commits and closed nearly 600 issues.
Why did it take us so long? Well rewrites are difficult… there is an older piece of software in place which kind of does what you want but not really. Still if you release your new version has to be somewhat good enough. With this preview release we feel that all the major building blocks of the Shoes DSL itself are in place. Finally.
This release is really important to me. You know, it’s super hard to work on a project for so long without any release. Without any users. Other than your co-contributors there really aren’t many playing with what you build. Not many people to report bugs. Not many people to build something awesome. Not many people telling you that what you do actually matters. Sometimes this makes it a bit hard to motivate yourself. Therefore I want to thank everyone who during that time encouraged anyone of us, wrote an email saying that shoes is awesome or even grabbed a release straight from github and tried it out. Every time that happened it put a big smile on my face and motivated me to put in a couple of hours of extra work. I ❤ you!
Hackers gonna hack
Of course a release doesn’t mean that people are really using what you build. I tried to make a little effort writing the announcement blog post and sending out some announcement emails. So far we have a bit over 260 gem downloads, which is good I guess 🙂 There will hopefully be a wider coverage if we get a release out.
Of course, this is just preview release. Nothing stable. We’re hard at work and already got some nice new bug fixes and improvements lined up. Stay tuned for the preview2 release and subsequent releases until we hit a release candidate!
Thanks
Last but not least I want to thank everyone who ever contributed to shoes4 – not only code but reporting issues, just trying stuff out. Thank you really, your support means a lot! Also to whoever funds me or funded me on gittip – thank you!
More personalized thanks go out to Eric Watson and Jason R. Clark! Eric has probably been the most steady contributor to shoes4. He’s been there from the start, still is, still going strong. And hopefully will for a long time 🙂 Recently he’s been hard at work converting our specs to the rspec3 syntax. Jason on the other hand is a more recent addition to the team – his first commits date back to around September 2013. Nevertheless he’s been pretty hard at work solving vital issues and hard to crack bugs. Lately he’s been hunting down operating system handles we didn’t free up!
What impresses me most about the two of them is that they both have a family and a job but still find the time to work on open source. I hope I’ll be the same once I’m at that point in my life! I mean Eric even has 5 children! FIVE! I can’t even imagine what that’s like 🙂 . But that’s super fun too. I’ll never forget remote pair programming with him with one of his kids running around in the background and waiving. Or Jason attributing the first open source contribution of his daughter on shoes. All super fun memories.
So everybody, shoes is coming. Try the preview release. Or wait for the next one. Or the release candidate. No matter what. Shoes is coming!
Shoes on!
Tobi
Journeys of a not so young anymore Software Engineer 