The Ruby Blend

Welcome to The Ruby Blend! On today's episode, we have a special guest, Brittany Martin, who is Lead Web Developer for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, where she is part of a team that develops the non-profits ticketing and festival web application and is also the host of the Ruby on Rails Podcast on the 5 by 5 Network. Brittany is here to tell us all about what she does, gem wrappers, and she is seeking some counsel from the guys today on various things. We talk about how important Readme's are, useful tools for documentation, a project from Evil Martians, a gem called Combustion, and RSpec API documentation is discussed. We end with Brittany telling us all about her passion for being in the Roller derby. Download this episode now!
 

Guests:

[00:01:51] We start here by Brittany telling us all about gem wrappers
 and what she's working on. She asks the guys if it makes sense to create
 an almost fake Rails app that she ships along with the certificate or
 ship beside it that shows a user how to use it? Andrew answers and
 mentions reading a lot of code from Vladimir, who goes by palkan, and
 Brittany mentions Piotr Murach, who wrote a great article about writing
 gem specs.

 [00:07:14] Brittany asks the guys if they ship their VCR cassette
 tapes with their code and do they find it useful or do they think that
 VCR cassette tapes should be ephemeral?

 [00:13:25] Nate tell us how he markets his open source repositories
 and when he has a new project that he is excited about, what kind of
 steps he takes.

 [00:15:13] Brittany asks the guys what does it feel like when you
 publish a library and people start opening issues with it? Is it a weird
 mix of joy and a little bit of panic or are you just excited overall?

 [00:17:27] Ron asks Nate if he has any advice on how to build that
 initial community and for getting those initial enthusiasts. Nate brings
 up a video from Derek Sivers about "How to start a movement." Great
 advice from Nate here and an awesome quote!
 

 [00:20:17] Andrew talks about setting up a Rails App, how important
 Readme's are, and he mentions a repo that he points to a lot called
 Awesome Readme's." He also mentions documentations have to be good, and
 he tells us resources to help with this, which is a project from Evil
 Martians, Read the Docs, and GitBook.
 

 [00:24:10] Brittany wants to know when do you outgrow your Readme and
 are all the tools that you offered better than using GitHub Wiki?
 Brittany mentions how she was stoked to get the Google Pay as the gem
 name.

 [00:28:15] With the example Rails project that Brittany wants to ship
 with the gem, she wonders if it should be part of the gem itself or
 should it be a separate repository? Andrew and Nate help out with this.

 [00:31:55] Andrew talks about if you're worried about hard to debug
 tickets, he created a reproduction template on how to quickly and easily
 reproduce your issue. Also, if you want a community, he suggests
 creating a place for them. He mentions Jared White, maintainer of
 Bridgetown, R.B. Andrew asks Brittany why did she decide to develop it
 in private rather than putting it in as a work in progress as the
 status, or the gem description, and if you try it then it's on you?
 
 [00:38:26] Brittany tells us her empathy with Rails engines, and if
 she's done a local path to a locally sourced engine as well.

 [00:40:58] Andrews tells us about a Gem called "Combustion" that helps
 with engine testing that palkan uses a lot.
 
 [00:42:33] Andrew asks everyone when you write gems do you use yard?
 Brittany mentions RSpec API documentation which she's used in past jobs
 and is pretty amazing.
 
 [00:46:10] Andrew talks about the tool "docsify" and an Evil Martians
 blog post about it.
 
 [00:46:56] Brittany talks about her passion of being in the Roller
 Derby, under the name Norma Skates, after Norman Bates.

Special Guest: Brittany Martin.

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