open source

I recovered another program I wrote in 1995: ELPDS, or Enhanced Logical & Physical Drive Status. Run ELPDS C: and it reports physical disk geometry, partition entries, FAT b...

In 1998 I needed to convert PDF files to text for a search engine called Alkaline, without requiring separately installed libraries. So I wrote a C++ parser. Alkaline is another...

In 1997 I wrote UcsLink.Fusion for the University of Geneva. We had hundreds of PCs across the city, Sun and Windows NT servers, and Windows 95 and Linux workstations. Getting a...

In January 1998, a classmate and I wrote a game. It was called “Bolongas zBalls”, and it was a Java applet.

In July 1998, the Internet Society held INET ‘98, “The Internet Summit”, at Palexpo in Geneva. The University of Geneva provided about 250 computers for the conference, and I wa...

In the 1990s I wrote a document manager for a small business in Geneva with about 20 workstations. Most of its staff were new to computers, and folders were a challenging idea t...

In his Rails World 2026 keynote DHH talks about one-shot apps built almost instantly with an agent as part of Omarchy. His canonical example is Omacalc, a dead simple calculator...

While reviewing dozens of PRs from ericproulx optimizing Grape’s internals recently, I noticed that the bare raise ArgumentError, "..." calls scattered across the codebase were ...

distance_of_time_in_words is a small Ruby gem that turns two Time objects into a human-readable string like “3 days and 4 hours”. Several separate bug reports against it turned ...

My previous post walked through four bugs in ruby-enum, a gem I maintain, all stemming from the fact that class-level instance variables aren’t inherited by subclasses. The thir...

The ruby-enum gem is a small library I maintain that adds enum-like behavior to a class via include Ruby::Enum and define :KEY, value. Four pull requests landed against it recen...

Before AI coding assistants, a typical engineering team built expertise with the years: new team members joined, contributed small bug fixes, then were given more ambitious task...

You may have landed here because I had just apologized for my obsessiveness over punctuation in a GitHub comment and requested changes to your pull request, or you noticed me ad...

Should you work on week-ends?

Most paying customers expect a certain level of (paid) support. One opens a ticket, gets a response, and any issue can be resolved.

Have you watched The IT Crowd? It’s a hilarious British television sitcom from around 2006 that cast a bunch of IT geniuses at the Reynholm Industries tech support department in...

Every active open-source project grows a lot of low hanging fruit. Encouraging project users to harvest some of the yield can be a great way to engage and retain new contributor...

I’ve been very active in open source since around 2008 and have become very passionate about growing contributors and maintainers in the projects I am involved in. The health of...

Yesterday, the Linux Foundation (LF) announced the new OpenSearch Software Foundation, with Amazon transferring the 3½ year old open-source project to LF (RT). This outcome ensu...

I’ve now been at Amazon for 3 years, and it has been a year since I joined OpenSearch, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Last week we released Op...

I had to quickly ramp up my Python over the past few weeks. Mind, because Ruby is obviously better, I’ve never really written any Python in 20 years of programming. At least not...

I keep antagonizing OSS contributors trying to wrap text in Markdown files, e.g. here and here.

If you made any significant, high quality, contribution to one of my open-source projects, and have a decent contribution history on Github, I will ask you to join as a co-maint...

I’ve rebooted vestris.com and have incorporated it in New York State to serve as a legal entity for my open-source projects, including the many slack bots.

Building the Artsy Open-Source Engineering Brand, Austin CTO Summit ‘19

Today I bid farewell to Artsy. This post is my personal journey and my last post as CTO.

I took a deep breath, and released Grape Framework 1.0. We’re at 8,066 Github stars and 965 forks. I still think Grape is the best way to build Ruby RESTful APIs. I’ve written m...

I’ve been co-maintaining the Ruby library hashie for a few years now. It’s a wonderful set of extensions written by some of the best Ruby developers. But sometimes, a piece o...

It’s no secret that hiring and retaining engineering talent is going to be only more challenging in the years to come. The world’s largest companies across all industries are no...

A Facebook Live interview during CTO Summit NYC 2016 following a talk on Inspiring Team Leads to Give Away Their Legos. The interview recording is no longer available.

I have thousands of Github clones on my computer. You might also know that I have a massive OCD for organizing things. I organize my personal documents by year, going back to 19...

I’ve launched playplay.io, based on my open-source slack-gamebot. It can currently track your ping pong, pool, chess and tic-tac-toe games.

I recently worked on the Artsy Engineering Compensation Framework, and more specifically on the Engineering ladder, open-sourced today. I have done this before, but never with s...

tl;dr Watch this video instead!

I had a great conversation with Aliaksandr Astapenka and Pavel Paulau about open-source on CTOCast #6. It’s in Russian. CTOCast подкаст о технологиях, процессах, инфраструктуре ...

I get this question a lot. I turned to my friends, HN and Twitter for some advice.

I’m very excited to be speaking at GoGaRuCo in San Francisco in September about taking over open-source projects, along with people like @wycats, @ultrasaurus and @pat. No press...

Facebook’s GIT repository is a single 54GB animal that builds Facebook. It’s not that big - they haven’t seen the MS Windows one! Actually, I take that back - anecdotal evidence...

If you are in the market for a color library, you’ll find many. I needed to convert a hex color into a UIColor. Let’s try with Artsy purple. Rumor is that it was inspired by Ken...

My first CocoaPod described in this post sparked a discussion with the CocoaPods team. There are a few things I didn’t like about the project organization.

I’ve learned a great deal about iOS UI in the past couple of months, mostly working on the Artsy Mobile app and the in-Fair experience for the New York Armory Show. I feel incre...

Right behind Your First Ruby Gem, here’s a walkthrough of creating your first Objective-C CocoaPod. Now, I must admit that after only two months of Objective-C programming, I am...

dotNetINstaller 2.3 has been released.

Given an Enumerable, you can detect a value that matches a condition. But what if you want the result of the evaluation? You can now use _Enumerable##detect_value _from the enum...

I felt compelled to troll healthcare.gov, too. It’s an easy target: The JavaScript assets aren’t even compressed. Look at their sheer incompetence! But, if you dig just a little...

We talk a lot about error handling in Ruby. But we rarely talk about raising errors and creating helpful error messages that are actionable. A good error should tell the develop...

UPDATE: I did another iteration of live-coding a Ruby gem at Flatiron School in January 2018. The code, a very similar but more complete and up-to-date checklist is here.

I visited a friend who lives in a remote, tropical region of the United States. He’s a doctor and a practicing eye surgeon. The island has both the very rich and the extremely p...

I’m very excited to Release Grape 0.4.0 today. Again, thanks to the 10 (!) contributors to this release.

https://github.com/dblock/resourcelib

Aside of all the posts about recruiting (recruiter spam dropped by 75%, amazing, thank you very much), website performance and the importance of source code, I wrote a few posts...

I just published a new gem: rspec-rerun. It’s a packaged solution to rerunning failed RSpec tests. See README for details.

tl;dr watch the video

I had a short, but lively debate over code reviews with @skamille at New York’s QCon 2012. That same day she wrote an interesting blog post on code reviews. She argues that “cod...

Jenkins AnsiColor, the essential Jenkins plugin version 0.3.0 has been released.

https://dblock.github.io/msiext/

I wrote a blog post yesterday about How to Start Small With Big Data and Google Analytics. Essentially, it’s a jumpstart for fetching Google Analytics pageviews and merging the ...

I want to talk about your scope of influence as a Software Engineer and how to expand it.

After almost a year of active development with 200+ commits, Grape 0.2.0 has finally been released. It’s the code from the “frontier” branch that we’ve been using in production ...

You’d think someone has implemented simple conversion of numbers into English by now? For example 42 becomes “forty-two”.

I moved the popular VMWareTasks C# library from CodePlex to Github.

I read Bertrand’s post on “Tales from the Evil Empire” about him leaving Microsoft this morning. Congratulations. We have never met, but your blog was in my RSS feed for a very ...

One of the frequently requested features in Grape is to automatically reload code changes, much like Rails does (#131). This is actually pretty difficult to implement and requir...

I heart Github and its magical green merge button. The entire fork/pull/merge workflow has been singlehandedly responsible for a massive amount of open-source contributions by m...

In 93’ I wrote a Guestbook CGI in C++. Then in 94’ I made my first blogging system. I honestly don’t remember what technology it used, but I think it was some hairy PHP with a t...

When choosing to use an open source project you might want to know whether it’s still developed or at least maintained. For Ruby projects I used to check Rubygems release dates....

I just came back from Mongo Boston and I am really excited for 10gen. Once again I met actual human beings that were really happy about using a database and wanted to share that...

Another fine open-source contribution from @aaw, mongoid_collection_snapshot: easy maintenance of collections of processed data in MongoDB with the Mongoid ODM.

With so many coffee breaks a day we can’t just have interns writing coffee. Introducing jQuery.konami, a new open-source plugin from @craigspaeth. You know something awesome is ...

I’ve released AnsiColor, a Jenkins plugin you’ve all been waiting for.

Oh, I know how much you want this!

We all have wish lists. Here’s the deal. Contribute to any of these open-source projects and I will help you in any way I can.

Yet again I have to deal with 3rd party licenses, this time in RoR. It’s a pretty common thing to do for technical managers and in my last job I ended up creating 3licenses. For...

In the last 24 hours my Github Is Your New Resume post gathered 343 comments between my blog, HN and Reddit. There are also 233 RTs. First, I want to thank those with good comme...

We’ve been trying to fix an issue with our continuous integration where Capybara tests were failing, but the CI process reported success. Rather annoying for CI!

I just released a new version of svn2svn 1.2, a tool for replaying changes in SVN repositories.

When someone says that you need a “100 grams” to figure something out, it means that it’s completely unobvious and complicated and therefore you need a few vodka shots. Vodka in...

In 2009 I gave away the remainder of my old company’s, Vestris Inc., software. The source code for all of it is also available here.

I had a nice time today wrapping up the Idee PixMatch API in a Ruby gem. PixMatch is a general image matching engine that allows you to perform large scale image comparisons and...

This morning, Dan Croak, chief marketing officer at Thoughtbot, has finally come forward as an amazing open-source contributor. All his previous contributions to the core Rails ...

You’ve heard about continuous deployment. But did you actually try to do it?

This morning OpenSource.com published my new article: How to become and amazing contributor to an open-source project.

You might have heard about the massive controversy about Hudson’s move to Github. I could have stirred a big storm in a cup for the Java Native Access (JNA) project, but instead...

My second article on opensource.com. You got to love the graphics that the site designer picked! It speaks to the concept of “solving complexity”.

I answered 7 distinct questions from 7 different people about implementing Waffle this morning. Most are non-trivial configuration issues, but that’s not the point.

Following a much pleasing trend of developers contributing major functionality to my open-source projects, @nsleightholm (Neil Sleightholm who works for a company called X2Syste...

My first article on opensource.com > read.

This is a story of corporate change. It’s a tale about how an unlikely organization embraced open-source. It starts with pain and suffering and may even read like an “I hate my ...

I’ve released the RemoteInstaller Test Framework 1.2. It’s the second open-source release, and I am pleased to see some community adoption. RemoteInstall is a system for automat...

3.2.5 shipped quietly last week.

I made a code commit to JNA today. Yes, I am committing Java code to an LGPL project on java.net. Please don’t hate me. I don’t want to be dodging stones, so I’ll be sticking to...

I am pleased to announce the open-sourcing of AppSecInc. MSI Extensions.

I am pleased to announce the open sourcing of the RemoteInstall Test Framework.

I shipped dotNetInstaller 1.7 yesterday. Download it here. You can see the long list of what’s new on the release page, but that’s not the topic of my post.

I’ve added icon support in ResourceLib, an open source C# File Resource Management library. This lets you programmatically enumerate and change icons in an executable/dll. I nee...

I’ve been heavily contributing to a project called DNI or dotNetInstaller in the past several months. DNI is a setup bootstrapper that basically chains multiple MSIs together an...