Baroquebobcat

Mountain West Ruby Conf this year was awesome. I totally had a blast.

It was the third time I’ve gone to it. It was my first conference and still is my favorite. I got to meet Matz, I gave a lightning talk, I met all sorts of interesting people and I learned a bunch of new things. To quote Matz, MountainWest RubyConfはすばらしかった。

Things to revisit

• Archaeopteryx

• Rails 3

• Rack(1.1.0 in particular)

• Chef(looks better than the last time I poked at it)

• EventMachine

• Yard

New things(to me)

• RVM(rvm looks pretty handy, especially for cross vm library development)

• Ruby-Processing

• Hubris(this might be a neat way to get into Haskell development)

• Mucking about with the binary interfaces(because it is awesome.)

My lightning talk

A few weeks ago, during a period of frustration, I found myself repeatedly mistyping ‘sudo.’ So, in a fit of silliness I wrote a short script to insult me when I did it, and put it in the path.

Later, I packaged it as a gem, because a) I had never built a gem with an executable and b) gems are a great way to share things.

The end result?

http://github.com/baroquebobcat/usdo

It isn’t particularly smart, but I happen to find it funny. It also showed to me how far gem packaging has come. Gemcutter and Jeweler make building and distributing ruby gems freakishly easy. This is especially awesome in light of the recent announcement that gemcutter is going to be the default gems host(though at rubygems.org)

How I put it together

I ran jeweler to create the default directory structure and added a bin dir to it, for the files I wanted to end up in the path.

$ jeweler usdo
cd usdo
mkdir bin

I put my gist from before in the bin directory, and set up git.

Set up my gem info in my Rakefile

#...
Jeweler::Tasks.new do |gem|
  gem.name = "usdo"
  gem.summary = %Q{adds usdo command to ridicule mispellings of sudo}
  gem.description = %Q{...}
  gem.email = "ndh@baroquebobcat.com"
  gem.homepage = "http://github.com/baroquebobcat/usdo"
  gem.authors = ["Nick Howard"]
end

then did the jeweler gem initialization dance

rake version:write
rake gemspec
rake install

Testing it out:

$ usdo -l
----USDO----
    You mispelled sudo
    You can't do anything, you can't even spell sudo
    are you really sure you want to try running
    'sudo -l'????

Now that was working, to send it up for distribution.

Jeweler is awesome and now has gemcutter support. I followed the jeweler README‘s directions on uploading to gemcutter. Which makes pushing your gem as simple as

$ rake gemcutter:release

Awesome.

Check out my code if you want.