Tech Notes From The Trenches

The other day I released the Whuffiebank gem. It is a library that implements the Whuffiebank API in Ruby.

Even though I have tested it and written tests to go with it, I haven’t used it yet. I plan to implement it on Hopsy, but I haven’t had time yet.

I am not a hardcore user of the Whuffiebank, meaning that I haven’t given any whuffies yet and no one has ever given me any whuffies. I have yet to contribute to the Whuffie economy.

But I like the idea of Twitter handles having a certain monthly ‘karma number‘. That’s why I built this open source gem. Hopefully it will be useful for many developers.

At Hopsy, I have used it to rank tweets. I have built a simple formula that takes the Topsy influence and the Whuffiebank reputation and returns a number.

The higher the number, the more important the result. Simple. That’s my attempt to reduce the ‘Twitter noise‘ out there. I know there is still a long way to go.

The other day I was browsing through open source projects on GitHub and I found the topsy gem. (A gem is a ruby library that can be used for a certain purpose)

Initially, I was upset. It was a new gem for something that I had built more than one month ago. I thought that the programmer behind it (Wynn Netherland) should have collaborated with my existing gem: rtopsy.

After reviewing his code, I realized that he had developed a better version of my gem. So I decided that it was an opportunity to learn more about Ruby, gems and APIs.

I reached out to Wynn (via Twitter) and we decided to collaborate on the topsy gem. I added some ‘business objects’ to the gem. He added some logic for the rate limit status info. I added more documentation and examples. We worked through tests together.

The end result: A more stable version of the Topsy API Ruby gem. In the process, I learned a lot about testing code with fakeweb.