The launch of isitruby1.9.com is exciting for a couple of reasons.  The obvious reasons are that this is something that we, as Ruby developers, needed.  It gets the Brightbox name out there.   And it’s also nice to get people together and give something to “the community”.  

But personally, what I like best about it, is that the entire site was built, from original idea to launch in less than five days.  

Last weekend, Caius and I had chatted about how we needed to test our stuff against Ruby 1.9.  John suggested automatically downloading and testing gems and reporting the results back to a web-site “a bit like the wine project does”.  David popped up in our Jabber room a couple of hours later saying “I’ve had an idea … isitruby19.com … list stuff that does and doesn’t work with ruby 1.9″.  Jeremy liked the idea … “I could probably skin it tomorrow night”.  

And so an evening of hacking by David gets a basic framework in place – he pulls the gems from Rubyforge and adds a comments model.  I take over on Monday, putting a basic HTML interface together, with gravatars and captchas, which Jeremy then makes look nice.  A blind alley over user registration, a few problems with Ferret, but by Tuesday we were pretty much done.  Deploy to the live site on Wednesday and then we just needed to test a few gems to seed the display.  Come Thursday and we all tweet about the new site … and isitruby1.9.com is launched.

From our point of view, it was great to do.  We still had our normal “day” jobs to deal with, but the excitement of a brand new project (with the added pressure of knowing that there were probably other people with the same idea looking to launch soon) was fantastic.  

And there’s still loads to do (as you can see from the discussion ongoing on the Brightbox forums) but I have to say I’m really pleased with how things have worked out so far.  We kept it agile, we kept it focussed and we kept it fun!