Unspace

You heard it here second - I’ve officially joined the Unspace team.

About a year and ten weeks ago, I noticed an interesting topic on the Rails mailing list: a cool-looking templating language called Haml had just been released. Last spring, my Software Design and Development instructor had encouraged all the students to contribute to open-source software, so I decided to give it a go.

Haml seemed like a great place to start. It was small enough to have a very manageable codebase. It was young enough that there were major, interesting features left to implement.

Not that there’s a ton of code now, nor that there aren’t any interesting features left to add. But I think we forget how hard it is to make that first leap and submitting that first patch to an open-source project. You don’t know the process, you don’t know the code, you feel like you’re impinging somehow on the demesne of the author. At least that’s how I felt.

I did end up making a patch, though. It added support for the multiline character, ”|”. I spent several hours coding it up, posted it to the bug tracker, and high-tailed it off for a day-long drama retreat. Only when I returned did I realize that I had forgotten to attach the patch to the bug.

Luckily, my reputation wasn’t besmirched too much. Hampton committed it as revision 46. I was delighted.

Feeling encouraged, I submitted more and more patches. At revision 87, Hampton got fed up with committing patch after patch from me and just gave me Subversion access so I could commit them myself. Revision 88 was my first commit. Just a few bug fixes, but it still has a place in my heart.

I certainly made good use of my commit access. I pretty much spent my free time that year hacking Haml. When Hampton dreamt up Sass, I implemented that as well. It was fantastic.

Then in February, I got a huge surprise. Unspace, the Rails shop for which Hampton worked, offered to pay my way to RailsConf 2007. They were using Haml and Sass in all their apps, and wanted to thank me for my work.

At the conference, in addition to seeing Hampton face-to-face for the first time, I met Mike Ferrier, Pete Forde, and Jeff Hardy, some of his fellow Unspacers¹. They were all terribly awesome people.

As time went by, we kept in contact (largely through Hampton). I did a few odd coding things for Unspace. And now that the quarter’s almost over I’ll have time to do a lot more. Because of this, logistics, and (I’d like to think) my own virtues as a programmer, the Unspace team has decided to make me one of them.

So there you go.

¹ Jeff has since moved on to 37signals.