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HTTP/2 200 cache-control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate content-type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8 etag: W/"84eaed99462502b6e97774f3cb33d576" nel: {"report_to":"heroku-nel","response_headers":["Via"],"max_age":3600,"success_fraction":0.01,"failure_fraction":0.1} referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin report-to: {"group":"heroku-nel","endpoints":[{"url":"https://nel.heroku.com/reports?s=XE8zzv%2FHkJpiilSfpWQn%2B90CV42joT1VqlYrg%2FXvBIE%3D\u0026sid=c4c9725f-1ab0-44d8-820f-430df2718e11\u0026ts=1760241749"}],"max_age":3600} reporting-endpoints: heroku-nel="https://nel.heroku.com/reports?s=XE8zzv%2FHkJpiilSfpWQn%2B90CV42joT1VqlYrg%2FXvBIE%3D&sid=c4c9725f-1ab0-44d8-820f-430df2718e11&ts=1760241749" server: Heroku strict-transport-security: max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains via: 2.0 heroku-router x-content-type-options: nosniff x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN x-permitted-cross-domain-policies: none x-request-id: 5ae8463e-32da-efe2-d3dc-3a95793bf929 x-runtime: 0.009653 x-xss-protection: 0 content-length: 102800 date: Sun, 12 Oct 2025 04:02:29 GMT The Ruby Toolbox Explore and compare open source Ruby libraries https://www.ruby-toolbox.com Easier contributions to Ruby Toolbox via Devcontainers Hello everyone, I hope you're well!It's now easier than ever to contribute to the Ruby Toolbox Rails application with a simplified setup using <a href="https://containers.dev">devcontainers</a>, allowing to easily create a containerized cloud development environment using <a href="https://github.com/features/codespaces">GitHub Codespaces</a> or locally using the <a href="https://github.com/devcontainers/cli">devcontainers CLI</a> or the <a href="https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers">devcontainers VS Code extension</a>. <img src="/blog/codespaces.png" style="max-width: 75%"> You can <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/1307">find the pull request that introduced this on GitHub</a> and additional documentation can be found inside the repository in <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/blob/main/.devcontainer/README.md">.devcontainer/README.md</a>.This functionality goes along with another recent addition - <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1205">partial production database dumps</a>.In development, it's useful to have a realistic dataset - however, with all the historical data the complete Ruby Toolbox production dump is quite large and takes a long time to import.Therefore, <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1205">I recently introduced partial production dumps</a> which only provide a meaningful subset (all projects in categories and all categories, plus the top 1000 projects regardless of having a category, plus only recent gem download data).Locally, you can simply run <code>bin/pull_database</code> to fetch the latest partial dump and import it into your local database, and you will immediately have a realistic-looking Ruby Toolbox running locally 🎉 This functionality is also utilized automatically for the devcontainers setup on launch.Best, Christoph Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2024-05-31/devcontainers https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2024-05-31/devcontainers 15 years of Ruby Toolbox Hello everyone, I hope you're well!On this day 15 years ago, shortly before boarding a plane headed to RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas, I launched this website. <a href="https://railscasts.com/episodes/195-my-favorite-web-apps-in-2009?view=asciicast"> <img src="/blog/railscasts2009.png" style="max-width: 75%"> </a> Back then, many rubyists were still struggling making the somewhat bumpy transition from the 1.8 to the 1.9 version (which has become much less cumbersome ever since, thank you Ruby core team!), Rails was in the middle of a big refactoring, later released as Rails 3.0.0, <a href="https://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/">after the merge with merb</a>, Rubygems were still hosted on RubyForge and Gemcutter, which later replaced it, was <a href="https://www.rubyinside.com/gemcutter-a-fast-and-easy-approach-to-ruby-gem-hosting-2281.html">released later in the summer of 2009</a>.The first version of this site was merely a Rake task fetching some data from the (still quite new!) GitHub API and generating some static HTML files to be served by an Apache webserver from some tiny VPS.It's great to see the Ruby community still grow, evolve and thrive after all these years, and I'm proud that many found this website a useful resource along their journey and I was able to contribute to the community through it.My impression is that the attitude towards open source software maintainers has also come a long way during this time, which is great, and initiatives like Ruby Central and the Rails Foundation are providing core infrastructure of our open source community with the necessary financial backing - but please keep in mind to also support your own favorite projects, help out on the issue trackers, donate some money, be kind to each other, so the Ruby community can continue to grow and thrive for the next 15 years, and beyond!Best, Christoph Wed, 1 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2024-05-01/15-years-of-ruby-toolbox https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2024-05-01/15-years-of-ruby-toolbox Rubygem dependencies on project pages Hello everyone, I hope you're well!I recently added <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/891">displaying of rubygem dependencies to project details pages</a>.This also includes the <a href="/blog/2018-12-14/project-health-indicators">corresponding health indicators for each dependency</a> so you can also get a quick overview on the number and state of a project's dependencies<img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/123865720-8fd7b900-d92c-11eb-8c0a-e35e9941ae08.png">I hope you find this new addition useful - Stay safe and healthy!Best, Christoph Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2021-06-29/rubygem-dependencies https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2021-06-29/rubygem-dependencies Search speed improvements Hello everyone,in recent months the response times of the search had become pretty slow, usually taking several seconds to return results.I therefore spent some time to switch the underlying full text search to utilize <a href="https://www.meilisearch.com/">MeiliSearch</a> instead of Postgres' built-in full text search as the index after some initial prototyping had shown promising results (Related PRs: <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/831">1</a> and <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/845">2</a>).I did some simple benchmarks after the switch and the response times went down from ~13 seconds to ~1 second. Still not great, but it's back to reasonable usability again. I will keep looking into potential further improvements of this in the next months.In other news in the beginning of this year I have upgraded the site to run on <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/801">Ruby 3</a> and the latest version of <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/800">Rails</a> and I'd like to take this opportunity to extend a big thank you to all contributors that continue to make the Ruby ecosystem such a pleasant place.Stay safe and healthy and until next time!Best, Christoph Fri, 19 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2021-03-19/search-speed-improvements https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2021-03-19/search-speed-improvements Project READMEs Hello everyone,I hope you're getting through this awkward year reasonably well!You can now find <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/731">project READMEs shown on individual project pages</a> directly on the Ruby Toolbox.This should save you a few clicks through to the repositories of libraries you are looking into as you can now find this content directly here:<img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/91770425-70bfac00-ebe1-11ea-8c3a-44eb7cb64ac0.png">I hope you find this new addition useful - Stay safe and healthy!Best, Christoph Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2020-10-30/project-readmes https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2020-10-30/project-readmes API for Project Data I <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/598">recently</a> launched <a href="/pages/docs/api/projects">a projects API</a> that allows to to fetch project information from the Ruby Toolbox programmatically.Raw data access has been possible through the <a href="/pages/docs/features/production_database_exports">production database dumps</a> for a <a href="/blog/2018-09-30/database-exports">long time</a>, but this did not include calculated data like <a href="https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-12-14/project-health-indicators">project health</a> badges, and fetching and importing the database dumps also is a bit tedious.Via the API you can now fetch this data for arbitrary sets of projects <a href="/api/projects/compare/rubocop,slim">easily</a>.A simple API client is also available as <a href="/projects/rubytoolbox-api"><code>rubytoolbox-api</code></a>. In the next months I will look into providing additional tooling around this.<ul> <li><a href="/pages/docs/api/projects">API documentation</a></li> <li><a href="/projects/rubytoolbox-api">Ruby Client</a></li> <li><a href="/api/projects/compare/rubocop,slim">Example call</a></li> </ul><hr>On another note you might have noticed that last month <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/615">an issue arose that led projects to lose track of their corresponding</a> GitHub repo and report it with a big red "Repository gone" badge. This has <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/649">been fixed recently</a> and all data should be displayed correctly again - sorry for the mixup!Last but not least as you may know my work on this site is being funded via <a href="https://rubytogether.org">Ruby Together</a>, alongside their <a href="https://rubytogether.org/team">funding of work on critical ruby infrastructure</a> like RubyGems and Bundler, so if you're not supporting Ruby Together yet but are in a situation you could do so and consider their work worthwile, please consider <a href="https://rubytogether.org">becoming a supporter</a> ❤️Most importantly: Take good care of yourselves, your close ones and your not so close ones too through those strange times, and stay safe and healthy!Best, Christoph Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2020-04-29/api-for-project-data https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2020-04-29/api-for-project-data Rubygem Release History Heatmaps Happy new year everyone!A <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/548">few months ago</a> I added a heatmap to illustrate quarterly Rubygem release activity in a straight-forward manner:<img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/72109034-2c6f5b00-3335-11ea-98ec-c1d4f3e802d6.png">Since the data still needed to catch up the feature was not really ready for the official announcement treatment upon release, and afterwards I never quite got around to actually write the post - so here it finally is!On a side note it's great how CSS grid allows to whip up this kind of layout in a responsive manner in the matter of a few minutes :)I hope this new feature will help you in getting a quicker understanding of recent and historical activity on Rubygems without having to sift through the more detailed data displayed on gems.Best, Christoph Thu, 9 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2020-01-09/rubygem-release-heatmaps https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2020-01-09/rubygem-release-heatmaps Time Flies <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091126033506/https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/news/launched_.html">On this day 10 years ago I launched the Ruby Toolbox</a>. When I built the original site I definetely did not think this funny little idea of mine would still be useful to people ten years later, but here we are :) <a href="https://railscasts.com/episodes/195-my-favorite-web-apps-in-2009?view=asciicast"> <img src="/blog/railscasts2009.png" style="max-width: 75%"> </a> Shortly after the release I went to <a href="https://conferences.oreilly.com/rails2009">RailsConf 2009</a>, told people about it and from there on the site <a href="https://news.mynavi.jp/article/20090519-a051/">started to gain popularity in the community pretty quickly</a>.If you'd like to hear a bit more about the Ruby Toolbox's history I spoke a bit about this with <a href="https://twitter.com/brittjmartin">Brittany Martin</a> last year during <a href="https://5by5.tv/rubyonrails/242">my appearance on the Ruby on Rails Podcast</a>.<hr>I'm very proud I could add a tiny little piece to the wonderful Ruby ecosystem - thanks to all the people I've had the pleasure to meet and talk about the Toolbox (and a million other things) over the years, thanks to everyone making Ruby such a fantastic community to be a part of, and last but not least thanks to <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">Ruby Together</a> for <a href="/blog/2018-02-01/lets-push-things-forward">their support of my recent work, without which the site would likely not exist anymore</a>!Here's to the next 10 years :)Best, Christoph Wed, 1 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-05-01/time-flies https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-05-01/time-flies Trending Projects Discovery of new & trending projects came in 2nd place behind the <a href="/blog/2018-12-14/project-health-indicators"> Detection and flagging of unmaintained projects</a> in the <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">recent community survey</a>. In that regard today I'm happy to introduce <a href="/trends">trending projects</a>.The overall goal was to identify libraries that already have some sustained traction while still growing:<a href="/trends"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/53574089-2cc49480-3b6f-11e9-8085-568d2ead4d24.png"></a>This feature is based on the <a href="/blog/2019-02-25/historical-gem-download-charts">recently</a> added <a href="/pages/docs/features/historical_rubygem_download_data">historical rubygem download data</a>.I'd love to describe the elaborate uses of machine learning techniques used to build the feature but it's simply based on recent Rubygem download rates and their growth, with the query tweaked until the results seemed consistent and reasonable to me. If you're interested in specifics or would like to suggest improvements please take a look at the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/blob/532373ba54097541d0d4965863c7e43273acb684/app/jobs/rubygem_trends_job.rb#L34-L42">query on GitHub</a>, <a href="/pages/docs/features/trending_projects">the feature's documentation page</a> or the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/449">original pull request</a>.<hr>Today's release also marks the end of my time working on the Ruby Toolbox as my main project that I <a href="/blog/2018-11-05/community-survey">began in last December</a> thanks to <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">Ruby Together's</a> ongoing funding of my work on this site. I will of course continue maintaining the site and adding improvements, but the recent activity spike ends today as I begin a new freelance project soon.To close things properly I will follow up with a look back at the goals set based on <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">December's community survey results</a> within the next two weeks, but I'd already like to say a big thank you to <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">Ruby Together</a> for their support and sincerely hope that my recent work on the Ruby Toolbox has helped to make it more useful to you!Best, Christoph Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-02-28/trending-projects https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-02-28/trending-projects Historical Rubygem Download Charts Today I'm happy to announce the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/428">launch of historical Rubygem download charts</a>.On <a href="/projects/rake">each</a> <a href="/projects/rspec">Rubygem's</a> <a href="/projects/simplecov">page</a> you can now find a chart displaying both the total number of downloads as well as the downloads per month, starting in late 2010.<a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/428"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/53082732-c5b73800-34fd-11e9-8534-b3f116fd2005.png"></a>The dataset was reconstructed from Ruby Toolbox backups as well as the <a href="https://bestgems.org">Bestgems.org</a> API. Thanks a lot to the Bestgems creator <a href="https://github.com/xmisao">xmisao</a> for collecting and providing this data!You can also find an overview of how the dataset was reconstructed on our <a href="/pages/docs/features/historical_rubygem_download_data">corresponding documentation page</a>.As usual if you'd like to give feedback or have suggestions for improvements on this a great place for that is the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/428">Pull Request of the feature</a>.Best, Christoph Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-02-25/historical-gem-download-charts https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-02-25/historical-gem-download-charts Project Comparisons In last November's <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">community survey</a> the ability to compare any selected projects side by side came in 3rd in the feature requests vote.Following the <a href="/blog/2019-01-31/alternate-project-display-modes">recent addition of alternate project display modes</a> today I'm happy to introduce a new <a href="/compare/celluloid,concurrent-ruby,eventmachine">Project Comparison feature</a>. It lets you select any projects of your choice and display them side by side just as in ordinary categories and search results.Comparison pages <a href="/compare/jekyll,middleman?display=compact&order=rubygem_first_release_on">are linkable</a>, so it's also easy to share them with others. Would you like to reference a set of different libraries for your latest blog post? Would you like to keep an ongoing curated list of your favorite gems? That's very easy now by just sharing the URL of a comparison page.<a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/408"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/52794499-38449580-3070-11e9-876c-a0f2309b4e85.gif"></a>As usual if you'd like to give feedback or have suggestions for improvements on this a great place for that is the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/408">Pull Request of the feature</a>.Best, Christoph Thu, 14 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-02-14/project-comparisons https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-02-14/project-comparisons Alternate Project Display Modes In the <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">recent community survey</a> many users requested the ability to view project data side by side and improvements to the way project metrics are presented.To that end today I'd like to introduce two new, alternate project display modes:<ul> <li>In the "Compact" mode only the most relevant metrics and links are shown, reducing the need to scroll and parse heaps of data to get a quick overview </li> <li>In the even more reduced "Table" mode the focus is as well on key metrics, displayed in a concise table to enable getting a quick overview faster </li> </ul>The Compact mode is now the default for category pages on mobile devices and for search results on all devices. Of course you can switch between the different modes:<a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/398"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/52065330-95235480-2576-11e9-92eb-86abe71060f8.gif"></a>In related news as you can see on the screenshot the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/401">category bar charts are finally back</a>. They were a popular feature of the old site and were <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/126">often requested to be brought back</a> - now they finally are :)This addition also sets the stage for another upcoming feature that was requested in the <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">community survey</a>: <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/408">custom project comparisons</a>. Those should arrive sometime during the next week.As usual if you'd like to give feedback or have suggestions for improvements on this a great place for that is the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/398">Pull Request of the feature</a>.Best, Christoph Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-31/alternate-project-display-modes https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-31/alternate-project-display-modes Metrics Documentation & Statistics Today I'm happy to introduce a new <a href="/pages/docs/index">metrics documentation & statistics section</a>.As part of the <a href="/blog/2019-01-09/new-landing-page">ongoing effort</a> of making the site more beginner-friendly all project metrics now link to a dedicated page that explains the purpose of the metric and gives guidance on how it can help choose a library.To make those pages more appealing to all visitors the pages also feature statistics around the Ruby ecosystem, including charts that display the distribution of this metric's values as well as top project rankings. Which <a href="/pages/docs/metrics/rubygem_first_release_on">year saw the most new Rubygems</a>? Which <a href="/pages/docs/metrics/rubygem_reverse_dependencies_count">gems have the most reverse dependencies</a>? <a href="/pages/docs/metrics/rubygem_latest_release_on">How many gems saw their last release in which year</a>? You can now find up-to-date answers to those questions on the Ruby Toolbox:<a href="/pages/docs/metrics/rubygem_downloads"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/51672731-7cda9500-1fcc-11e9-9a3a-6556aa9a7e51.gif"></a>This addition continues the <a href="/blog/2019-01-16/bugfix-fork-detection-and-filtering">recently started effort</a> of bringing more <a href="/pages/docs/index">documentation and guidance to the site</a> by making documentation a dedicated site section and bringing a sidebar navigation, enabling the easy addition and discovery of upcoming content.As usual if you'd like to give feedback or have suggestions for improvements on this a great place for that is the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/388">Pull Request of the feature</a>.Best, Christoph Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-24/metrics-documentation-and-statistics https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-24/metrics-documentation-and-statistics Bugfix Fork Detection & Filtering Improvements to search result relevance were another big topic in the <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">recent community survey</a>. In that regard today I'd like to introduce the <a href="/pages/docs/features/bugfix_forks">detection of bugfix forks</a>.Bugfix forks are patched variants of popular gems, usually from a time before <a href="/projects/bundler">bundler</a> made it very easy to switch a gem source to a patched git repo branch while waiting for the fix to be merged and released upstream.They usually have very few downloads and only a single release, long in the past - however, they often still link the very popular upstream github repo, leading to a very high toolbox popularity score. Now, since the score affects the search result order, for popular keywords the top results used to be full of those forked gems.Based on what I observed on those libraries I <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/377">added logic to detect those bugfix forks</a> and <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/380">excluded them by default from search results</a>, with a toggle button to re-enable display.To illustrate how this affects search results, here's the <a href="/search?q=authentication">top 10 search results for the term "authentication"</a> before this change and afterwards, with the default of filtered bugfix forks (Rubygem downloads in parentheses).<table> <thead> <tr> <th>Before</th> <th>Now</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>devise (43168395)</td> <td>devise (43168395)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>graffititracker_devise (2662)</td> <td>warden (43948376)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>cloudfoundry-devise (3560)</td> <td>omniauth (26476271)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>shingara-devise (4833)</td> <td>mixlib-authentication (10410063)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>devise-no-session (365)</td> <td>ruby-hmac (11883122)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>upstream-devise (997)</td> <td>ntlm-http (8837767)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>mongoid-devise (3097)</td> <td>koala (6816462)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>namxam-devise (1403)</td> <td>authlogic (3591583)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>rmello-devise (2280)</td> <td>net-http-digest_auth (10186524)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>loyal_devise (12907)</td> <td>rubyntlm (10124188)</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>On top of that <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/375">search results now finally have pagination</a>. Together with the <a href="/blog/2019-01-09/project-sorting">recently launched project sorting</a>, these three changes will hopefully bring a significant improvement to your Ruby Toolbox search experience:<a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/380"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/51126093-92103080-1822-11e9-8971-c7d32fb1c327.gif"></a>This feature also brings the first <a href="/pages/docs/features/bugfix_forks">feature documentation page</a>. <a href="/blog/2019-01-09/new-landing-page">As mentioned before</a> I want to work more on this topic in the next weeks to make the site's features easier to understand and accessible.As usual if you'd like to give feedback on this a great place for that is the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/380">Pull Request</a> of the feature.Best, Christoph Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-16/bugfix-fork-detection-and-filtering https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-16/bugfix-fork-detection-and-filtering New Landing Page Following shortly after the new <a href="/blog/2019-01-09/project-sorting">custom project sorting</a> today I'm happy to introduce a new landing page that I've been working on.One huge takeaway from November's <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">community survey</a> was that the Toolbox should become much more welcoming to new visitors and explain it's purpose.Previously site visitors were thrown directly to the <a href="/categories">categories list</a>, without any explanations of what this actually is. To that end, the new landing page gives an overview of what this site is supposed to help you with and also provides a list of popular categories to make it easier to get familiar with popular tools of our community without being thrown into the ocean of the full categories list without further assistance.<a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/335"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/50903215-702b3e00-141d-11e9-96ae-6e0e11a50b10.png"></a>The illustration for the new page is by <a href="https://www.fiverr.com/barbara_dj">Barbara Đokić</a>. I think she did a fantastic job on that, thanks a lot Barbara!This change is one step in the ongoing effort to make the site friendlier and more accessible. Another aspect I will be working on in the next weeks are guides and documentation.As usual, if you'd like to give feedback on this a great place for that is the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/335">Pull Request</a> of the feature. I'm looking forward to hear your thoughts!Best, Christoph Wed, 9 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-09/new-landing-page https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-09/new-landing-page Project Sorting Happy new year everyone! I'm back from vacation and going into my second month of working on the Ruby Toolbox backed by <a href="https://rubytogether.org">Ruby Together</a>.Today I <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/360">released</a> custom project sorting, another often-requested feature from the <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">recent community survey</a>.It allows you to sort project lists within categories and search results by project metrics like the date of first release, number of reverse dependencies, recent commit activity and more, which can be helpful to quickly find projects based on the metrics most relevant to you:<a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/360"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/50854775-4e32ac80-1386-11e9-905b-15ed8e2c4ea9.gif"></a>If you'd like to give feedback on this a great place for that is the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/360">Pull Request</a> of the feature.I'll be back soon with more new stuff :)Best, Christoph Wed, 9 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-09/project-sorting https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2019-01-09/project-sorting Project Health Indicators In the <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">recent community survey</a> the detection and flagging of unmaintained projects turned out as the most-often requested feature.To give you a better overview of the maintenance status of any project from today on you can find a set of colored badges on each project that provide a visual indication of it's health based on common properties like the time since the last gem release, recent commit activity and open issue rates.<a href="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/50006036-af947500-ffac-11e8-9a9b-532676a194a4.gif"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/50006036-af947500-ffac-11e8-9a9b-532676a194a4.gif"></a>The labels are of course based on the project metrics already shown, but by automatically interpreting the plain data into colored indicators I hope to provide you with an easier indication of the health of a project without having to compare the plain values.I chose to use one year as the limit for yellow warnings and three years for red warnings. However, this might not be fitting to all libraries. If you think an assessment is unfair or inaccurate, please <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/355">add your feedback on the original PR</a> for this feature. (You may also add your feedback if you think it is very fair and accurate of course ;)You can also use the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/355">PR</a> to propose additional health checks. In that regard I'd like to take the opportunity to advertise the <a href="/blog/2018-09-30/database-exports">daily database exports</a> - browsing the actual dataset can be very helpful in identifying new health checks, and I hope we can add more of those over the next months.The health indicators do not affect the project ranking for now since I plan to look into possible improvements of the project scoring mechanism in the next weeks anyway.In the last two weeks I also made a lot of smaller improvements and preparations for upcoming features, most notably I <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pull/350">refined the appeareance of categories across the site</a>:<a href="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/50003992-e74bee80-ffa5-11e8-915d-2e11ea4cd3d9.gif"><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13972/50003992-e74bee80-ffa5-11e8-915d-2e11ea4cd3d9.gif"></a>For more details please take a look at (and bring your feedback to) <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed">the recent pull requests</a>, I always try to provide a good overview of the purpose of each change in the pull request description.Best, Christoph Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-12-14/project-health-indicators https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-12-14/project-health-indicators Community Survey Results Thanks to <a href="https://www.rubytogether.org">Ruby Together</a> I'll be <a href="/blog/2018-11-05/community-survey">working on Ruby Toolbox as my main project in December and January</a>. To help me find out what areas of the Ruby Toolbox to prioritize <a href="/blog/2018-11-05/community-survey">I ran a community survey</a> to find out what community members wanted to see improved.The survey took place from November 5th until December 2nd 2018 and a surprisingly exact 100 people took part. I assure you no foul play was involved in getting to this number. :)The survey mostly consisted of a few intentionally fairly open questions; my goal was to get an honest feedback from the community and to enable me to focus my time in the next weeks on what matters most to you. You all did an absolutely wonderful job at that, and I've received a tremendous amount of insights. Thank you very much! In general I think we have great alignment between what you consider most helpful to you and the direction I want to take, so that's nice :)I'd also like to give a big thanks to Stephanie Morillo for providing great advice and support around the survey!In this post, I’ll share the survey results.I have decided to mostly group the replies around features, both existing that should be improved as well as new ones. To give your voices room and enable transparency I have added your suggestions as quotes, so this is going to be a rather long read, sorry about that! Below you can find a brief overview if you're in a hurry.In the coming weeks I will work on bringing your suggestions to life, so if you want to follow along with that please keep an eye on <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox">rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox</a> on GitHub. I have also set up a <a href="https://gitter.im/rubytoolbox/Lobby">community chatroom on gitter</a> where I should be reachable during work days if you have any questions or would like to join the discussion.tl;dr Here's a brief overview of the main outcomes:<ul> <li>Users generally seem happy with the site, yay :)</li> <li>However, the site could do a better job at marketing and explaining its purpose to newcomers</li> <li>Discovery of trending projects and clear recognizability of deprecated ones were the two highest-voted features</li> <li>Categories should be cleaned up and improved. There should be better explanations on how to contribute to the catalog as well</li> <li>Search should be improved</li> <li>Many users would like to be able to sort by other things than the score</li> <li>A way to compare projects side by side was also requested often and was popular in the feature vote</li> <li>The UI is a bit too reduced</li> </ul>And without further ado, on to the detailed results:<h3>What is your experience with Ruby?</h3><table> <tr> <th>Expert</th> <td>59</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Intermediate</th> <td>36</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Beginner</th> <td>3</td> </tr> <tr> <th>(no answer)</th> <td>2</td> </tr> </table>Somewhat to my surprise, by far the largest group of respondents consider themselves expert Ruby users, with only very few "beginner" users. This is quite contrary to my expectation and to what other people also wrote, in that the site can be helpful especially to beginners. There were also quite a few suggestions to generally do a better job at marketing the site.<blockquote> As odd as this sounds, a bit of marketing perhaps. Rubygems is the defacto place to go as you must to get gems, I wonder how people who don't know about ruby toolbox start here. I wonder how when people are blogging about gems, what features would make them link into this site over others. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Marketing of the project (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Add a blog section, so the site might become more popular (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> I thought it was down, so I don't know. I used to use it to compare between gems and find out about new alternatives. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> When I'm exploring something unfamiliar, Ruby toolbox assumes the user has some knowledge of tool terminology. For instance, if I was exploring databases for the first time, I might not know that an "Object-relational mapping" tool is. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> No clue what it is, or how its supposed to help me. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote>In general, I'm very aware the Ruby Toolbox could do a much better job of onboarding new users. There's more on this topic below on the start page and guides sections, but as it stands there is very little for an unfamiliar visitor to understand how the site can be helpful to them. To that end, I'm planning on improving the landing page and some of the guides to help clarify what the Toolbox is and how it helps Rubyists.This could be a wild guess, but I suspect some beginners might have felt they didn't have much to contribute in filling out the survey. If we do another survey in the future, I will add specific callouts to encourage more participation form early-career Rubyists.Additionally, I would like to reach out to providers of entry-level resources with the goal of seeing if they could introduce their learners to the Toolbox. If you are providing learning resources in the Ruby community and have some ideas around that, please reach out via one of the contact methods listed in the footer :)Finally, if you have already been working with Ruby for a while chances are you are working with juniors - if you think this site would be helpful to them, please spread the word :)<h3>How often do you visit the Ruby Toolbox?</h3><table> <tr> <th>What is a Ruby Toolbox?</th> <td>2</td> </tr> <tr> <th>A few times per year</th> <td>31</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Monthly</th> <td>44</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Weekly</th> <td>20</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Daily</th> <td>1</td> </tr> <tr> <th>(no answer)</th> <td>2</td> </tr> </table>The majority of users visit on a regular basis, which matches my expectation for a tool that you reach for whenever you need it's help.<h3>What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?</h3>Disclaimer: This is the only section where I have omitted a whole bunch of survey replies since they were very similar. I tried my best to reflect the general tone in the picked quotes.<blockquote> Categorized list of gems based on need/use. Easy to go straight to what you probably want to use in your project. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Providing all the info I need. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Categorize gems and give a rough and relatively simple overview over its health and popularity. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Categorisation of packages in a way that makes a group easily searchable by intention. Best source of knowledge of relative popularity and if a repository is stale/maintained. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Provides a high level survey and health check of libraries in a category. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Show project metrics which make it easy to spot if the project being actively maintained. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> It helps me discover new repositories instead of using the mainstays. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> The classic site was my go to for a semi-curated list of handy purpose built gems. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> I had no reason to search for another curated list so far. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Keeps me up to date on community gems for specific purposes (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Great as a reference for gems in a particular category. Typically use to find good candidates. Sometimes browse more generally for ideas. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Shows me alternatives. Allows me to vet new dependencies and make sure they are well maintained and supported by the community. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Provide a great overview of available gems, their alternatives, their development state, their usage, ... (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> It's a good catalog (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Quickly find a gem in a category of functionality I need. Then lets me pick which one(s) are still alive. I have found it to be missing entries sometimes, but you can add them on GitHub which is easy enough for a dev. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Curated collections (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> When I want to explore new ways to do familiar stuff, Ruby Toolbox does an awesome job showing all of the options, regardless of how popular. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote>So generally it seems the site serves its purpose well for most users.One thing I sometimes notice in conversations is that users are not aware of the fact that the Toolbox is not only limited to the categories, it also lists all RubyGems (and has since 2011) and can help you check the health and popularity of all of them. Again, if this is happening to users regularly the site should communicate this aspect more clearly:<blockquote> Needs to be more complete in gems - should be able to get all gems from rubygems and have an entry for it. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><h3>Features</h3>As previously stated, the main purpose of this survey was to figure out what improvements are the most relevant to the community so I can emphasize those in my work on the site. There was a multi-response vote on a few features I proposed, as well as an open text box for other suggestions.<h5>What features would you like to see added or improved?</h5><table> <tr> <th>Detection and flagging of unmaintained projects</th> <td>73</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Discovery of new & trending projects</th> <td>72</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Project comparisons (select a few projects and compare data side-by-side)</th> <td>48</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Search</th> <td>32</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Guides (i.e. tips for picking a library)</th> <td>29</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Project changelogs</th> <td>17</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Project READMEs</th> <td>15</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Historical Data</th> <td>14</td> </tr> <tr> <th>API</th> <td>11</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Command line interface</th> <td>5</td> </tr> <tr> <th>More metrics</th> <td>4</td> </tr> </table><h5>Categories</h5><blockquote> Categorization (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> Collections that relate together (even if not under same category. One example is the dry-rb gems. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> Better categorization. I think to start with simply move all the Rails categories under Rails - it's polluting the homepage. Gems can be discovered through different category paths like Sidekiq can be from background processing and from Rails - background processing (as an example). (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> Maybe implement some sort of tagging feature? (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> tags, apart from categories, and less concrete (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Better categorization and search. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> I often think the categories could be done better, but I really don't have any specific ideas about how to go about that. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> In addition to improving search, I suggest putting additional work into categorization. Is there a way to improve how tools are categorized, and how to find tools for which an appropriate category does not yet exist? (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> the suggestion (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Honestly the site is just about perfect. All it really needs is a bit more editorial time spent on each category. And also in adding/editing the categories themselves. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>As you can see, the topic of categories came up a lot. I don't think adding more layers of categories into the hierarchy would really help, because it could make things harder to discover. There is, however, definitely a need for a spring cleaning and some restructuring of the existing categories. I will look into this in the next few weeks.It would probably also be helpful to flag some categories as "essential" and emphasize them on the site somehow (see the section below). This might also make it easier to understand the purpose of the site for newcomers.A while ago GitHub also added repository tags. I want to look into adding those as a second way of categorization. As things usually go with tags on the internet I do have the suspicion that no two actually comparable projects use the same set of tags on their repositories though, so let's see how that goes :) An extra challenge here will likely be the UX part of it, to avoid confusion about what these category and tag things are, where they are coming from and how they differ.<blockquote> (...) Also more project categorization coverage with ability to multi-categorize. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>Multi-categorizations have been possible since the relaunch of the site, please send PRs against the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog">catalog</a> if something is wrong :) I will try to find ways of documenting those features better.<blockquote> Better tagging or categorization of gems. For example, if I'm looking at the acts as paranoid gem, it'd be nice to have a link to a "soft-delete" category that suggests alternatives like paranoia and discard. (Feature Requests) </blockquote>From individual projects, the category it is filed under is already linked. However, on the old site there was a sidebar which also featured "similar categories", and "similar projects" sections which linked directly to related projects. Those have not re-appeared yet mostly due to a lack of time, but it would indeed make sense to bring them back.<h5>Contributing to the catalog</h5><blockquote> Maybe make it easier to add a project. (I don't recall ever having seen a way to get a project added.) (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>To give some background: On the old Toolbox site project changes could be submitted directly on the site and went to a review page. Building and maintaining such a feature costs time, so for the new site I decided to keep it simple and just go with GitHub pull requests. However, I think all ceremony around sending a PR for minor changes still has a lot of friction, and the process surely can still be improved. On the other hand having a transparent and documented process is great. I think the docs can be improved here as well.<blockquote> Faster add alternative libraries. Some PRs are very long unreviewed and not responded to. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>Currently, it sometimes takes around a month to get a valid PR merged, as I usually do them in one fell swoop. I will do my best to improve this situation. If you are interested in helping to <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog">maintain the catalog</a>, please let me know!<h5>Search & Sorting</h5><blockquote> Need better sorting and filtering/facets (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> SORTING (by popularity, last commit time etc.) (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> did I already say SORTING (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Search. Quick example: if I search by "swagger" it won't find "rswag" gem which is a pretty popular project. I missed it when I was looking for a tool like that. Found it thanks to some blog post. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Better sorting and filters of projects -- I'd like to sort by recent activity (ie. projects that are still active, updated within past 6 months) and to filter out old projects (ie. last activity date older than 6/9/12/18+ months). Some categories have several dozen projects listed and finding the useful gem that is still active with sufficient followers/likes/forks sometimes gets buried deep down the list surrounded by others not touched in 5+ years. Can easily overlook a real gem of a Gem due to the noise. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Searching for keywords or patterns or concepts sometimes fails to yield any results. Manually tracking down the category will list gems that do the thing I searched for. So it seems that indexing isn't including all needed and wanted terms and keywords. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Sometimes I search for a gem by name and I would like to find similar (better) gems. This is sometimes very tricky. (e.g. gem is not suited in the proper category) (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> put more highlight on "last release" metric of a gem. and let me sort gems by that metric. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> search engine (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Take a look at <a href="https://www.algolia.com">https://www.algolia.com</a> as a search solution, it's free for opensource (Other) </blockquote>Regarding improvements of the search feature, I already created a <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/109">corresponding issue</a> on GitHub when the new site's first version of search went live earlier this year. There is a lot of room for improvement both in result quality and presentation.Additionally, a lot of participants requested custom sorting for category and search result views. That would surely make a lot of sense.I will work on both of these topics in the next weeks.<h5>Start page</h5><blockquote> The entrance to categories is a bit cluttered (the categories overview lists all subcategories, too which is good for CTRL+F but making a high-level overview more difficult). (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Homepage (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>To be fully honest, I think the current start page of the site is a barren wasteland. It does serve its purpose of showing the categories, but lacks so many other aspects. I mentioned much of this in the section regarding Ruby experience, but this page should become much more welcoming, giving users an explanation of what they can expect from the site and how they can use it to their benefit. My current plan here is to make a fairly slim landing page similar to <a href="https://www.rubygems.org">Rubygems.org</a> which can point to further, more focused pages like the categories overview. I will work on this soon.<h5>UI & Design</h5><blockquote> The design could be a little spruced up. I like the information density, but I think it could use a little more flair. However, I definitely prefer this design to the old one so don't go back to that :D (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> Design. The new web design looks more modern but somehow also makes it harder to distinguish between different parts of a page. More color/contrast or other visual aids would be appreciated. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> I like the new minimal UI and collection of metrics. It can still use another iteration to build a visual information hierarchy. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Do better website design, its sells (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> The UI and collection of metrics can still use another iteration to build a visual information hierarchy. Why? Each gem card has a lot of data to digest and the gem name is not visually strong like a H1 or H2 header to anchor the reader. A UI designer skilled in information hierarchy can best help with this, basically each gem card should have an H1, H2, body, muted body like hierarchy visually. You kind of have it but it needs more tuning to be super readable. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Not sure; I tend to like the simple look, but it's difficult to navigate all the categories. Also a bit too much project detail in the category, which makes me have to scroll a lot. Mostly layout. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> A percentage of issues closed in the short summary of projects does not give much indication. Displaying the open issues count metric instead would be awesome. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> dark mode! (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> (...) Also, the UI design is excellent. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> Its former website. Current website UI is not useful to me. Thanks for working on this anyways. (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well? / Other) </blockquote>Lots of excellent points were made here. I know that the design is somewhat too minimalistic, and sometimes makes it hard to identify the most important aspects. White space usage probably is also too liberal, and it could make better use of larger screens. I will iterate on this.<h5>Trending projects</h5>This was the second-highest topic on the feature vote.<blockquote> it would be good to have at the main page something like apps of the month or hot tools. this is what i miss in the place. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> More focus on newcomers / current usage (but at the same time respect "stable" libraries that do not change that often but do their job as expected) (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> highlight libraries that are becoming popular (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Most downloaded projects aggregating all categories: it would be useful to start a new project with most used tools. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> I dont know, maybe an competition? With prizes? Like, the best gem of the year? (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>For a while now I wanted to set up dedicated pages for each metric featuring explanations on why it can be interesting as well as graphs on how the values distribute across the entire RubyGems base. This could also feature the highest-ranking projects, both of all time and, where applicable, within the last year.Some particularly interesting of those might also make sense to be showcased on the improved start page, for example a list of the most-downloaded gems first released in the last 12 months.To enable general trends analysis, the Toolbox must start keeping track of historical data again. The old site used to do this for some metrics, but after the rebuild only the current state is kept in the database. Via <a href="https://data.ruby-toolbox.com/">database backups</a> at least the history of the last few months could be manually reproduced to backfill data if this gets built, maybe for some metrics other sources exist to get historical data as well.<h5>Deprecation</h5>This topic was the highest-voted in the feature vote, and it's also seen quite a bit of discussion <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/7">on github</a> for quite some time already.<blockquote> I'm OK with showing older projects, maybe just flag/cordone. Because sometimes you are trying to build something and there is not much out there, so you want to find something even a scrap of old code you can build upon. (Feature Requests) </blockquote>This user summed up my stance on this very well. I think even some old, outdated code can sometimes lead to great insights and inspiration, so I don't think hiding projects from the site would be a great idea.If you "know how to read the numbers" you can get this information on the Toolbox already, but I think it would be great to have some visual cues to aid in this. I will likely start with some hard-coded warnings (i.e. no release in 3 years) and hopefully we can iterate our way to a dependable and transparent solution here.<blockquote> Audit tool as a Command line interface to detect if a used gem has been maintained or has strong communities. And on the metrics side, watchers, forks and GitHub stars (Feature Requests) </blockquote>That's a great idea for a paid product right there ;)An automated tool could be of great help to spot risks in your codebase. Assuming the deprecation detection or ranking I wrote about is solid, at some point in the future it should be fairly straight forward to wrap it in an API and consume it from a CLI client. I'm not putting this on my schedule right now but I think it would be a very useful thing to have.For the time being, you could give the <a href="https://github.com/how-is/how_is">how_is</a> a try in this regard.<h5>Comparisons</h5><blockquote> Project comparisons are mentioned, I would think without a ton of manual effort, it may result in gems trying to one-up each other or the comparison being superficial. Unless you have a specifically good idea on how I'd hate for your valuable time to be tied up to it. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> More categories, or comparison of arbitrary gems (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> side-by-side comparisons of key gem attributes such as libhunt.com does (<a href="https://ruby.libhunt.com/compare-paper_trail-vs-audited?rel=cmp-lib">https://ruby.libhunt.com/compare-paper_trail-vs-audited?rel=cmp-lib</a>) -- but do it better, allow more than just 2 side-by-side comparisons (Feature Requests) </blockquote>This came in third in the feature vote. I think it would be very helpful in many situations to compare the metrics of projects side-by-side, I will work on this.<h5>Community features</h5><blockquote> Personal notes and ratings which are non-public (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> <ul> <li>Reviews</li> <li>Experiences from other developers with the library (Feature Requests) </li> </ul> </blockquote>Back when version 2 of the site launched in 2011 I also added a whole slew of community-oriented features: Logging in, starring projects, project commenting, blog post link aggregation and more. Ultimately, those features never caught up enough participation to become really useful.I think the additional burdens of building and maintaining social features in a web app in general, as well as moderating a community and taking care of all the data privacy problems that storing this slew of personally identifiable information brings is not worth it for the Ruby Toolbox at the moment.<h5>Charts</h5><blockquote> For each category, I want a bar chart of the top X projects. Just like the old website. This would allow me to know at a glance what the most famous libs are and how famous they are. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> visual comparison (I liked the old one); (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> Sparklines for histories. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>Yes! There's a <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/126">feature request for this on github, too</a>.Earlier this year I did some research into a charting library that might fit the bill, but literally could not find any I was fully happy with. No wonder everybody creates their own charting libraries all the time :)The charts absolutely must come back, I will look into this.<h5>Dependency Weight</h5><blockquote> How heavy are the projects: LOC, dependencies etc. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> <ul> <li>Dependencies</li> <li>"Used in" / "Known for" (Feature Requests) </li> </ul> </blockquote>On the old site, reverse dependencies (projects depending on this library) were displayed. Currently, only the total number of them is shown. Seeing what specific projects are using a library as a dependency can be quite helpful as well though, so it might be nice to start mirroring them from the rubygems API again.I really like the LOC idea. If we calculated those for each gem and combined it with the full dependency graph of a library it might make for some interesting additional metric in showing the total weight of the dependency you are adding.<h4>Changelogs & Update Notifications</h4><blockquote> 1) Notifications on updates (ideally taking semver into account, like get only notifications on 1.x branch, not on 2.x). 2) To accompany 1): show whether project uses semver (Feature Requests) </blockquote>Changelogs were part of the feature vote, but didn't get a huge amount of votes. To my best knowledge these are fairly tough to acquire since there are no APIs to source them from. For example, finding the appropriate git tag for a version can already prove tough. Many projects use the "v1.0.0" scheme, but some do not, and some do not tag consistently or at all. Then extracting changelogs is tough, because they are frequently in an arbitrarily-formatted <code>CHANGELOG</code> file, and for "meta-gems" like rails or rspec the actual gem usually does not see any changes, they all live in the sublibraries.So all in all, I'm not going to dive into this topic now. You might want to consider using automated dependency update services like <a href="https://depfu.com/">depfu</a> (disclosure: I know the people who make this, and use it on the Toolbox ;) or <a href="https://dependabot.com/">dependabot</a>, which usually incorporate changelogs for updated dependencies automatically.Regarding automated notifications please see what I wrote regarding community / social features above.<h5>More metrics / data from other services</h5><blockquote> Also I wonder if for common badges/integrations such as codeclimate, travis/circle build status and others, we could adopt the badges into the site. (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> I'd like to see code quality metric, it might help new projects arise (Feature Requests) </blockquote><blockquote> Support for Gitlab repositories (Feature Requests) </blockquote>I'm not a big fan of badges themselves, I think they somewhat break the visual experience of a page, and once you have more than 3 nobody is able to find the relevant one anyway. However, it might be worthwile to investigate API integrations into popular services like Travis, Circle, or Code Climate for further metrics.Regarding Gitlab (and other Git hosting providers for that matter): Currently, a total of 594 out of 148313 total ruby gems have a homepage or source code url set that contains "gitlab". The vast majority of the most downloaded ones come from repos owned by gitlab the company itself, so I think it's fair to say that it's a relatively niche subject at the moment.The main "problem" with bringing in other git hosts that I see is that it would actually skew scores against the project's favor. Since for the ranking the Toolbox uses the highest watchers / forks count as the reference point, and considering the generally lower interaction rate on Gitlab, projects that have a reasonable amount of gem downloads would get downgraded because in relation they have much less stars than "they should" for their size. As long as such a significant portion of the open source community (both creators as well as consumers) orbits mostly around GitHub I don't think it's worth the additional effort to support other providers as plenty of the value derived from the metrics the Toolbox shows depend upon the "wisdom of the crowd".<h5>Other feature requests</h5><blockquote> A Description or a list of every method exposes to the world and the return value from a gem. (Feature Requests) </blockquote>This is very tough to automate since there are no strong conventions into public / private API designation in the ruby ecosystem. I see this either in the responsibility of library docs themselves or documentation services like <a href="https://www.rubydoc.info/">rubydoc.info</a><blockquote> Bunch of information about gems. (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>Not sure I understood this one correctly, but I do intend to write some documentation on why / how to pick libraries, as well as some guidance and pointers to relevant docs for maintainers on how to set up your projects best to work together well with the Ruby Toolbox.<blockquote> tip to optimize the performance of each gem. (Feature Requests) </blockquote>Again, I don't see a way for Ruby Toolbox to do this in an automated manner, and I think library maintainers, Stack Overflow and bloggers already do a good job at this anyway.<blockquote> Maybe user should also be gently guided to the right gem/system to integrate assets (JS/SASS through gems or webpacker or other) (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>I'm very hesitant about moving into "editorial content" realms, since it takes a lot of time to create the content in the first place, and to keep it fresh afterwards. However, it might be a good idea to provide more background on categories themselves within their descriptions. I added support for short category descriptions when I rebuilt the site last year, however very few descriptions have actually been contributed via PRs so far, so if you have some time please send some along :)<blockquote> 3) show who sponsors which gem (Feature Requests) </blockquote>This is a very deep topic. In general the Ruby Toolbox has so far always taken a very "neutral" position here. Discussing how open source is funded probably goes way beyond the scope of this paragraph, but between enthusiasts loving to work on a specific a problem or building up their reputation, employees of tech companies solving a problem for themselves and open sourcing the code, companies and communities funding engineers to work on libraries, reduced-functionality open source with paid "enterprise" add-ons and commercial services that "open source" client libraries for interacting with their paid services, there's a huge variety of ways open source gets "sponsored". In order to somewhat dodge this bullet, the Toolbox focuses on what the community actually uses by it's regular ranking mechanism.<blockquote> 4) show if a Code of Conduct is used (Feature Requests) </blockquote>Yes, we should have this, and GitHub apparently supports it in their API as well now.<blockquote> 5) show which license is employed (Feature Requests) </blockquote>This is already part of the site, albeit only on the project details view, not on category overview pages.<blockquote> Contract me. (Other) </blockquote>Thank you, however I'm sorry but this service is not run by a company ;)<h3>Closing notes</h3>Many people also took the opportunity to say thanks for my work on this site. Thanks a lot for all your kind words, it fills me with great pride that I have made something that has proven useful to so many people in this community!<blockquote> Thanks for all your work!! (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Keep it up. Great service. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Keep up the good work! (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> I've always loved the site. Keep up the good work. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Thanks. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Thank you for your work on this. This website is one of the best ways as a new or mid-level dev to discover which gems in the community have mindshare. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> This project is so helpful! Thank you so much! I really appreciate all your time and effort. When your big crash happened I was so sad and disappointed at the prospect of this resource going away. I'm thrilled that you've brought it back to life. Thank you thank you thank you! (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU! (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Thanks for maintaining this! (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Appreciate the effort that went into and the valuable resource that is the ruby toolbox. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Was very glad to see RT back online after the issues. Was sorely missed. RT is often used by us during the startup of a new project to re-familiarize ourselves with what libs/projects/gems are available and how they've changed. Also used during "spring cleaning" times on long-running RoR projects to update the gem file for the same reasons as stated above. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> I love the project, and I'm really happy that so many people helped get it back online when it hit a bump in the road! <3 (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> thanks very much for keeping this up. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> You are doing great work! It’s very important site for whole ecosystem of ruby, I’m senior dev but I would recommend to focus on beginners/norms devs to keep community in good shape (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Really appreciate your work on bringing back Ruby Toolbox. I look forward to seeing it become the place for gem discovery. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Thanks, you are doing good job for ruby community. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> This tool helps me a lot each time I have to search for gems in a new area. Keep up the good work! (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> Thanks, the site rocks! Been a huge help to me over the years. (Other) </blockquote><blockquote> I’m already quite happy with what you do based on my needs =) (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote><blockquote> It's a wonderful toolbox ! (What does the Ruby Toolbox do well?) </blockquote><blockquote> You guys have been so great! (What can the Ruby Toolbox do better?) </blockquote>Ok, now on to some actual work, and please do stop by <a href="https://gitter.im/rubytoolbox/Lobby">the Ruby Toolbox chat room</a> and say hi!Best, Christoph Tue, 4 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results Community Survey Update 2018-12-05: The survey is now over. You can <a href="/blog/2018-12-04/survey-results">find the results published here</a>Hey everyone, I hope you're well!As you may know <a href="https://rubytogether.org">Ruby Together</a> is backing my work on the Ruby Toolbox with a weekly budget of 5 hours per week. However, this year I haven't used most of this, between my usual freelance work and family life, I'm not very good at moonlighting in my work on the Toolbox, and I want the trust put in my work via the backing to produce meaningful results for the Ruby community.The good news is that since my current freelance project is ending in november I have some time on my hands to work on the Ruby Toolbox in a more focused manner, so I will spend december and january working on the Toolbox as my main project. On May 1st, 2019 the Ruby Toolbox will celebrate it's 10th anniversary and I hope to deliver some great new things in the run-up to that.I have plenty of ideas I want to work on, but it's much more important to know how I can improve the Ruby Toolbox for you, so I have set up a <a href="https://survey-2018.ruby-toolbox.com/">community survey</a>. Please take a few minutes to give me some feedback on what you would like to see improved, this will greatly help me in focusing my work.If you are thinking about starting to contribute to the Ruby Toolbox this will also be a great time to do that. I will set up a community chat room and have regular "office hours" during the week where you can expect me to be reachable and available to answer your questions and discuss your ideas. I will make a separate news post towards the end of November with more details.Best, Christoph Mon, 5 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-11-05/community-survey https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-11-05/community-survey Production database exports If you visit <a href="https://data.ruby-toolbox.com">data.ruby-toolbox.com</a> you can now download recent Ruby Toolbox production postgres database dumps.The Ruby Toolbox dataset is interesting in that it combines a whole bunch of data about Ruby open source libraries from the Rubygems and Github APIs in one single place.There's two reasons I decided to set this up:<h3>Enable research into the state of the Ruby open source ecosystem</h3>I hope making this data more easily available to everyone instead of having to query and link all of it by yourself from the respective public APIs will enable some interesting research into the state of the Ruby ecosystemIn the coming months I would like to put more emphasis on making it visible at a glance how healthy a project is, based on for example recent commit activity or the number of reverse dependencies of libraries.If you look into the dataset and find some interesting aspects that should be displayed on the Ruby Toolbox, please <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox">open an issue for further discussion on Github</a>!<h3>Lower the barrier for contributing to Ruby Toolbox itself</h3>If you <code>git clone</code> the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox">Ruby Toolbox</a> repo, you can now import the most recent dump into your local development db with a simple <code>bin/pull_database</code>.The current Ruby Toolbox app relies a lot on having a reasonable local dataset for development, and I hope making local setup as frictionless as possible will help you to contribute to the Ruby Toolbox itself.Best,Christoph Sun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-09-30/database-exports https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-09-30/database-exports Let's push things forward Hello, good to see you again, and welcome to the new Ruby Toolbox!If you haven't been following Toolbox-related news recently, here's a quick rundown:<ul> <li>Started in 2009, over the past few years the existing site was in a deteriorating state of maintenance due to a continuous lack of free time on my side</li> <li>In early June of 2017, the Toolbox's server crashed and instead of rebuilding what we had from backups I decided to take this as a final sign to discuss the future of the site with the community, only putting an absolutely minimal static version of the site back online.</li> <li>I reached out and <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1">asked on github</a> whether people actually still want to have this resource - turns out many people still do, which was very encouraging, thank you :)</li> <li> <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">Ruby Together</a> soon reached out to me regarding funding my work on re-building and maintaining the site, which we announced at the end of September</li> </ul>I immediately got started on this during evening hours in early October. Holiday season and the surrounding family events put a brief dent into progress, but in January I got back on track and today I'm proud to present to you the new (<a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox">and finally fully open source</a>!) Ruby Toolbox!My main focus for the past few months was to provide a solid foundation based on what (at least I believe to be ;) the core of the old site - categories, project metrics, and search. I initially planned to launch as early as possible with an absolutely minimal subset, but eventually those pesky "this one more thing really needs to get done so it's nice"-tasks kept cropping up, so ~70 hours of work and ~40 pull requests later I believe we're launching with a feature set at least on par with the old site.Categories are now maintained via the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog">catalog repository on Github</a>. The catalog desperately needs a spring cleaning, contributions are highly welcome!<h3>Ruby Together and open source funding</h3>It's pretty safe to say that without the support by <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">Ruby Together</a>, this would not have been possible.Words cannot describe how grateful I am to be able to continue my work on this and actually also get paid for the time spent. Over the past almost 10 years since the site launched I put hundreds of hours of my spare time into this site for free, which became impossible to keep up in the long run.Over the past few years, funding for open source projects has finally become an issue that is being actively discussed, solutions are coming up, and this is absolutely wonderful. The authors and maintainers of the infrastructure and tools we rely on in our daily work deserve our support, so I really hope this will only keep growing further.If you like what I'm doing here, or maybe some other Ruby community work supported by <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">Ruby Together</a>, I'd like to invite you to consider setting up a <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">monthly donation to them</a>, be it as an individual or even the company you work for.<h3>Sponsors</h3>Another big thank you goes to <a href="https://heroku.com">Heroku</a> for sponsoring the hosting for this new site, and to <a href="https://appsignal.com">AppSignal</a> for providing their excellent exception tracking and monitoring service for free. Thanks!<h3>What's next</h3>This is only the beginning. You can find upcoming tasks on the <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/projects/1">project board on github</a>. Over the next weeks I want to add more project metrics, get started on cleaning up the catalog, provide useful help pages, improve the display of metrics (giving the values some more context in relation to other projects), and most importantly: Listen to your feedback. Let me know what you think on <a href="https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1">github</a>, on <a href="https://twitter.com/thedeadserious">Twitter</a> or via mail to christoph at ruby-toolbox dot com, I'm looking forward to it!Best,Christoph Thu, 1 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-02-01/lets-push-things-forward https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-02-01/lets-push-things-forward

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