Giving Thanks

Dan Croak

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.