Ruby Mendicant Project
by Gregory Brown
The Ruby Mendicant project was at first meant as a joke. Who would
be crazy enough to donate money to an individual developer to work on
unspecified open
source projects for 3-6 months without any explicit goals? As it
turns out, 70 individual Rubyists, along with Ruby Central, Inc. and
the MountainWest Ruby Conference were!
Gregory will provide a brief overview of the Ruby Mendicant project,
and then go on to show the end results, the new pure Ruby PDF
generation library called Prawn. This talk will highlight the sort
of things that are possible in an ideal free software development
situation, and touch topics such as performance tuning, testing
techniques, API design, documentation practices, and even community
building tips. In addition to these more general topics, this talk
will also have shiny demonstrations of what Prawn can do after 22
weeks of community funded development, helping people say goodbye to
PDF::Writer once and for all.
About Gregory Brown
Gregory Brown is a Ruby hacker with a deep interest in what makes
communities tick. He has contributed to Ruby's awesomeness by working
in the oh-so-exciting field of Business Reporting for the last several
years, building Ruby Reports and Prawn along the way. When not in
front of a keyboard, Gregory can be found either playing Go or
studying Buddhism. He lives with his girlfriend in New Haven, CT
where the two share an apartment with a small bamboo plant that is
seemingly capable of living without water.