Last weekend, I released my first real open source project, “Mr. Poole” (available on Github). Mr. Poole is a helper for Jekyll, which is the software I use to write this blog. In the several days I was using jekyll, I got annoyed at creating scaffolding for posts/drafts. It was taking so long (maybe like 5 seconds every time I had to do it), so obviously the solution was to spend many many hours writing a script to cut this 5 seconds down to 2. If there’s one thing programmers do, it’s spend hours now to save seconds later.
Mr. Poole is the butler in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (which I must admit, I’ve never read). According to Wikipedia, “Poole is Jekyll’s butler who, upon noticing the reclusiveness and changes of his master, goes to Utterson with the fear that his master has been murdered and his murderer, Mr Hyde, is residing in the chambers. Poole serves Jekyll faithfully, and attempts to do a good job and be loyal to his master.” I thought it was a clever name, and apparently a few other people did too (he who ships, wins).
Mr. Poole provides an executable (poole) that eases this process. Creating a
draft is as simply as running poole draft, which you can then create as a
post by running poole post. Creating a post can be done with poole post,
and if you decide later you don’t like it, it’s as easy as poole unpublish.
You can read all of the details on the
Github page.
At any rate, it was my first Ruby gem, and my first real open source project of my very own (I’ve contributed to others before). I think it’s doing pretty well (105 stars on Github and 317 downloads on RubyGems), which is pretty good considering I only announced it on my Twitter (which nobody reads, but you should!), on /r/ruby, and on Hacker News. I’ve already gotten one pull request, and hopefully people like it. Maybe one day I’ll have another decent idea for a project…it’s fun to contribute to the open-source community, and to participate in something that’s not a giant project.
Now it’s time to poole publish this thing and put it on THE INTERNET.