Giving thanks

Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s what thoughtbot is thankful for this year.

Our clients and customers

Thank you to our clients America’s Test Kitchen, Awesome Foundation, AxisCampus, Backupify, Blueleaf, CareZone, CoachUp, CountIt, Financial Diligence Networks, ImpulseSave, LevelUp, Lights Up, MAG+, MIT, Movenbank, OwnerAide, Redis to Go, Rock Lobby, SnapPay, Stattleship, Swoop, T1D, TDDium, Thrively, Truonex, Vertical Performance Partners, Yammer, and yBuy, for trusting us to work on your products.

Thank you to all of our workshop alumni, those of you who have bought one of our ebooks or screencasts, and everyone who is a Trajectory customer.

Software as a service providers

Thank you to Heroku for your awesome support and services hosting our applications.

Thank you to GitHub for hosting all of our open source and private code.

Thank you to CodeClimate for providing insight about the quality of our code.

Thank you to Travis CI for letting us know when our code is working (or broken) on various versions of Ruby.

Thank you to Rubygems.org for hosting software which makes our lives easier.

Thank you to 37signals for Campfire, Basecamp, and Ruby on Rails.

Thank you to Braintree for processing payments for ourselves and our clients.

Thank you to SendGrid for making world-class email delivery a no-brainer, and for your smart, friendly, tireless support.

Thank you to New Relic for making performance monitoring pleasant.

Thank you to Amazon for EC2, EBS, and S3.

Thank you to Tumblr for hosting our blog.

Thank you to Dropbox for hosting large design assets and important files.

Thank you to Google for Gmail, Analytics, Adwords, Hangouts, and search.

Business partners

Thank you to Gesmer Updegrove for handling our legal needs.

Thank you to AccountingDepartment.com for handling our accounting and bookkeeping.

Thank you to WeWork for our current home in San Francisco.

Thank you to CBRE and Richards Barry Joyce and Partners for helping us find our future home in San Francisco.

Thank you to TMF Group and Newcomers for helping us expand into Stockholm.

Open source contributors

Thank you to every person who submits a pull request to our open source projects, even the ones we don’t pull.

Thank you to Linus Torvalds for Git.

Thank you to Matz for Ruby.

Thank you to DHH, the Rails core team, and the Rails community for Rails.

Thank you to Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche for Bundler.

Thank you to Nick Quaranto, Terence Lee, and Larry Marburger for making the Bundler API faster.

Thank you to John Resig for jQuery.

Thank you to Jonas Nicklas for Capybara, a big step forward in browser simulation and acceptance testing.

Thank you to KDE, Apple, Google, Trolltech, and Nokia for Webkit and QtWebKit, which enabled our capybara-webkit.

Thank you to Bill Joy, Bram Moolenaar, and Tim Pope for making and improving Vim, our beloved text editor.

Thank you to the many Postgres committers for a rock-solid and always-improving database.

Thank you to Hampton Catlin, Nathan Weizenbaum, and Chris Eppstein for Haml and Sass.

Thank you to Max Howell for making it simple to install dependencies like C compilers, Postgres, Ack, Exuberant Ctags, Tmux, ImageMagick, Redis, and more with Homebrew.

Thank you to Wayne E. Seguin, Michal Papis, and 37signals for making it easy to manage Ruby versions with RVM and rbenv.

Thank you Nicholas Marriott for making it easier to manage various terminals with Tmux.

Thank you to Dennis Ritchie for software.

Teachers

Thank you to Alan Kay for object-oriented programming.

Thank you to Martin Fowler for refactoring.

Thank you to the Gang of Four for design patterns.

Thank you to Uncle Bob Martin for clean code.

Thank you to Gerard Meszaros for xUnit testing patterns.

Thank you to Gary Bernhardt for sharing performance-enhancing Unix, vim, testing, and OOP techniques on “Destroy All Software.”

Thank you to Avdi Grimm for “Objects on Rails” and its associated mailing list.

Event organizers and hosts

Thank you to Brian Cardarella, Patrick Robertson, and all of the Boston Ruby Group for a fantastic local Ruby community with great talks and a calendar full of hackfests.

Thank you to Brightcove, ZenDesk, and ApartmentList for hosting fun Ruby and vim meetups in Boston and San Francisco.

Thank you Wrapp for hosting meetups in Stockholm.

Thank you to Aloha Ruby, Burlington Ruby, Eurucamp, Frozen Rails, Lone Star Ruby Conf, MagicRuby, NordicRuby, Railsberry, Rocky Mountain Ruby, RubyConf, Ruby Nation, Rupy, and Scottish RubyConf for allowing us to share our passion for programming with others in person.

And thank you, too, for reading, commenting, and making us think.

Thank you

Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s what thoughtbot is thankful for this year.

Our clients and customers

Thank you to our clients: Advertising for Humanity, America’s Test Kitchen, Authorigin, Blueleaf, Boston.com, Carbonrally, Pilot, Crowdtap, Downstruct, Eatabit, Groupize, Iora Health, SCVNGR, Strobe, Swaave, TABB Group, Taskcruncher, Vertical Performance Partners, ybuy, and the ones we can’t name, for trusting us to design and develop your products.

Thank you to all of our workshop alumni, those of you who have bought Backbone.js on Rails, and everyone who is an Airbrake, Trajectory, and Copycopter customer.

Our partners and service providers

Thank you to Heroku for your awesome support and services hosting our applications.

Thank you to KISSmetrics for helping us make our products successful.

Thank you to docraptor for ending the worldwide nightmare of generating xls files.

Thank you to 37signals for Campfire, which we’re in all day long, every working day, and for Basecamp… and for Rails… and for Getting Real… THANK YOU.

Thank you to Github for hosting all of our code for open source projects and client applications alike. Also, thank you for hosting thoughtbot.com and to Tom Preston-Werner in particular for Jekyll.

Thank you to SendGrid for making world-class email delivery a no-brainer, and for your smart, friendly, tireless support.

Thank you to New Relic for making performance monitoring pleasant.

Thank you to Amazon Web Services for hosting our file uploads and for backing the next generation of hosting providers like Heroku and Engine Yard.

Thank you to Dribbble for providing daily inspiration.

Thank you to Tumblr for hosting our blog.

Thank you to Pixelmator.

Thank you to Dropbox for hosting our large design assets (like Photoshop files) and important files we need backups of (like contracts).

Thank you to Dennis Ritchie for software.

Thank you to Steve Jobs for Apple Computers.

Open source contributors

Thank you to every person who submits a pull request to our open source projects, even the ones we don’t pull.

Thank you to Xavier Shay for the load.c patch to 1.9.2, and Masaya Tarui for the patch to 1.9.3.

Thank you to Tim Harper for spork.

Thank you to Document Cloud and Jeremy Ashkenas for Backbone.js, Underscore.js, CoffeeScript, and generally getting us and the rest of the Rails community to stop writing jQuery spaghetti.

Thank you to John Trupiano and the other contributors for timecop, which allows us to travel in time effortlessly.

Thank you to Uncle Bob Martin, the Gang of Four, Alan Kay, and Martin Fowler for object-oriented programming, documenting/discussing refactoring, testing, and like every design pattern.

Thank you to Rémy Coutable and Thibaud Guillaume-Gentil for developing Guard, which lets us think about fewer things.

Thank you to Sven Fuchs, Josh Kalderimis, and Michael Klishin and the many contributors for Travis CI which lets us stop worrying so much about CI.

Thank you to the Rails community and the Rails core team for Rails.

Thank you to Yehuda Katz, Carl Lerche, and the other contributors to Bundler for easing our dependency pains.

Thank you to John Resig for jQuery, and to John, The Filament Group, and the other contributors to jQuery Mobile for making mobile web development fun.

Thank you to Jonas Nicklas for Capybara, a big step forward in browser simulation and acceptance testing. And thank you to KDE, Apple, Google, Trolltech, and Nokia for Webkit and QtWebKit, which enabled our capybara-webkit.

Thank you to David Chelimsky for RSpec, a beautiful and powerful testing library we use on all our apps.

Thank you to Bram Moolenaar and Tim Pope for making and improving vim, a tool that persists.

Thank you to Blake Mizerany, Ryan Tomakyo, and the other contributors to Sinatra for a great web framework that fills the gaps for many services in our application infrastructure.

Thank you to Justin French for making form writing easier and our forms more consistent.

Thank you to Nathan Weizenbaum for Sass.

Thank you to Max Howell for making installing dependencies like ImageMagick, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, libxml2, and more dead simple on Mac OS X.

Thank you to Wayne E. Seguin for making it easy to manage Ruby versions.

Boston event organizers and hosts

Thank you to Brian Cardarella, and all of the Boston Ruby Group for a fantastic Ruby scene with great talks and a calendar full of hackfests.

Thank you to Microsoft NERD for hosting a ridiculous amount of events this year.

And thank you, too, for reading.

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving’s pretty badass. Ignoring the history part, it’s a time to get together with friends and family and express gratitude. Here’s what thoughtbot’s thankful for this year.

Our clients and customers

Thank you to our clients Shortbord, Pozit, CS2Tech, Future Fridays, Mr. Youth, Pilot, Wowize, Tasted Menu, EataBit, 58Phases, Nature Publishing Group, Backchannel Media, drop.io, EOL, Where.com, and RelayHR for trusting us to design and develop your products.

Thank you to all of our training alumni and everyone who is a Hoptoad customer.

Our partners and service providers

Thank you to Engine Yard and Heroku for your awesome support and services hosting our applications.

Thank you to 37signals for Campfire, which we’re in all day long, every working day, and for Basecamp… and for Rails… and for Getting Real… THANK YOU.

Thank you to Github for hosting all of our code for open source projects and client applications alike. Also, thank you for hosting thoughtbot.com.

Thank you to Pivotal Labs for making project estimation and planning easy with Pivotal Tracker.

Thank you to SendGrid for making world-class email delivery a no-brainer, and for your smart, friendly, tireless support.

Thank you to New Relic for making performance monitoring pleasant.

Thank you to Amazon Web Services for hosting our file uploads and for backing the next generation of hosting providers like Heroku and Engine Yard.

Thank you to Dribbble for providing daily inspiration.

Thank you to Tumblr for hosting our blog.

Open source contributors

Thank you to the Rails community and the Rails core team for Rails 3.  Rails 3 is a great improvement and we’re thankful each time we use it.

Thank you to Yehuda Katz, Carl Lerche, and the other contributors to Bundler for easing our Ruby dependencies pain.

Thank you to John Resig for jQuery, and to John, The Filament Group, and the other contributors to jQuery Mobile for making mobile web development fun.

Thank you to Aslak Hellesøy for getting us to specify our apps in English with Cucumber.

Thank you to Jonas Nicklas for Capybara, a big step forward in browser simulation and acceptance testing.

Thank you to Hashrocket and Bernerd Schaefer for Akephalos, which is our new favorite tool in the Cucumber-Capybara stack for cleanly integration testing Javascript.

Thank you to David Chelimsky for RSpec, a beautiful and powerful testing library we use on all our apps.

Thank you to Bram Moolenaar and Tim Pope for making and improving vim, a tool that persists.

Thank you to Blake Mizerany, Ryan Tomakyo, and the other contributors to Sinatra for a great web framework that fills the gaps for a many services in our application infrastructure.

Thank you to Justin French for making form writing easier and our forms more consistent. We use Formtastic on all our projects.

Thank you to Nathan Weizenbaum for Sass, which we now use on all our projects.

Thank you to Max Howell for making installing dependencies like ImageMagick, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, libxml2, and more dead simple on Mac OS X.

Thank you to Wayne E. Seguin for making it easy to manage Ruby versions.

Boston event organizers and hosts

Thank you to Josh Nichols, Greg Sterndale, and all of the Boston Ruby Group for a fantastic Ruby scene with great talks and a calendar full of hackfests.

Thank you to Sermo, Bocoup, BackChannelMedia, and SCVNGR for hosting great Boston tech events, month after month.

Thank you to NoSQL Summer for getting us to read CS papers and for providing refreshing and intellectual discussions.

Thank you to Microsoft NERD for hosting a ridiculous amount of events this year.

Now go eat, drink, and be merry.

2 years of hackfests

On Tuesday, we’ll be hosting the November Boston.rb hackfest at the thoughtbot Boston office. This marks two years and about 30 total hackfests we’ve held here.

If you’ve never attended, please join us the first Tuesday night of every month. All skill levels and backgrounds are welcome.

attendance award

Josh Nichols deserves special recognition for attendance. He has attended more hackfests than anyone else and had about a year streak of perfect attendance once.

Thanks, Josh, for keeping the group active and vibrant.

celebrating the output

While the majority of the fun of the hackfests is meeting other locals interested in similar technologies, there has been an impressive number of open source projects big and small to which Boston Rubyists have contributed patches big and small during these hackfests.

We’d like to highlight those now and thank all those for contributing.

Note that many of the following were not written at the hackfests, although some were. All of the large projects simply had patches written at the hackfests by Boston Rubyists.

web application frameworks

Ruby on Rails is a full stack, Web application framework optimized for sustainable programming productivity, allows writing sound code by favoring convention over configuration.

gem management

Gemcutter is an open source Sinatra-and-Rails app for hosting Rubygems… awesomely.

Jeweler is a simple and opinionated helper for creating and managing Rubygem projects.

testing

RSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby.

Cucumber is a BDD framework that talks to domain experts first and code second.

rspec-rails is an RSpec extension that allows you to drive the development of Ruby on Rails applications with RSpec.

Shoulda is a context test framework built on Test::Unit and a set of Rails testing “macros” that can be used in any Ruby testing framework (RSpec, test/spec, etc.).

Quiet Backtrace suppresses the noise in your Test::Unit backtraces.

jferris/mocha is a fork of Mocha that adds test spies.

RR (Double Ruby) is a test double framework that features a rich selection of double techniques and a terse syntax.

greengreen is a tool for assuring quality metrics of 100% quality.

Factory Girl is a fixtures replacement with a straightforward definition syntax, support for multiple build strategies (saved instances, unsaved instances, attribute hashes, and stubbed objects), and support for multiple factories for the same class (user, admin_user, and so on), including factory inheritance.

templating things

Effigy is Ruby views without a templating language. (alternative to Mustache, ERb)

Slidedown lets you generate slides with Markdown, for display in web browsers.

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator that takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.

Rails apps

Boston.rb is the source code for http://bostonrb.org, a community site for local Rubyists.

Peas is the source code for http://peas.heroku.com, a URL shortener.

Echowaves is the source code for http://echowaves.com, social group chat aimed as an open source alternative to Campfire.

Clean Together is the source code for http://cleantogether.com, which lets people post their environmental cleanup experiences.

generators

Blitz is a Rails plugin for feature, view, controller, model, & helper generators meant to be used as part of an “Outside-In” Test-Driven Development cycle.

Webster generates random short words good for human-readable confirmation codes.

configuration

jferris/config_files is dotfiles for git, vim, zsh, & irb.

process management

Under Construction is JQuery Utility for hiding or overlaying elements that haven’t been built yet, inspired by Mile Marker.

search

Ambitious Sphinx is an Ambition adapter for Sphinx.

SearchModel is a Rails plug-in for building search forms.

authentication

Clearance is a Rails engine for authentication with email & password.

computer science

CS is is a gem containing some algorithms useful for computer science and math.

command-line interfaces

Beardo is a CLI for Co-op.

Hello is a Ruby interface to a collection of the word “hello” in many languages and dialects; written for Flickr-style messages after users sign in to a web application.

web service API wrappers

Le-Git is a Ruby wrapper for the Github API.

Daywalker is a Ruby wrapper around the Sunlight Labs API.

Twitter Search is a Ruby wrapper around the Twitter API.

countless failed and semi-failed experiments, incomplete hacks, forks, & bad ideas

Daddy Warbucks was a library idea to find orphaned Ruby code not
being sent messages from anywhere in your program. We learned a little bit about Kernel#set_trace_func and called it a night.

Recommendable was a Rails plugin concept for simple item-to-item collaborative filtering.

Nurse cares for invalid ActiveRecord objects.

dancroak/rails-templates contains Rails templates for Suspenders, Heroku, & MongoDB.

MySpace API Ruby wrapper.

Wikipedia API Ruby wrapper.

ActiveObject was an ActiveRecord-like library for persisted serialized Ruby objects.

Altering Shoulda to use context as its context/should framework.

Benchmarking an add-on to Thin.

An early, failed attempt at what Joe Ferris would later accomplish in Factory Girl.

Porting apps to Rails 2.1. Porting plugins to gems.

Videoconferencing in Eloy Duran at 1am his time in Amsterdam to talk about RubyCocoa.

Creating the first version of bostonrb.org in Merb, Haml, & DataMapper when none of us had ever used any of those tools.

and a lot of pizza & beer…

I’m sure I missed a lot. Feel free to add anything to the comments.

See you Tuesday night!