Ruby Mendicant officially ends (but not really)

[Gregory Brown]

Hi folks,

Just to let you know the extended deadline for the project is now
up. I am currently back into some of my contracting engagements, and
I am taking a course on abstract algebra this semester. As it turns
out, this means that my time is quickly becoming spoken for, so I'd
like to bring the 'official' mendicant period to a close.

Over the last 24 weeks, I have recorded 336.25 hours on Prawn. In
reality, this is only the time I spent actively working on the
project, I feel as if my thoughts and my energy have been focused on
the project for a whole lot more hours in a week than what I've been
able to come up with solid numbers for. Also, based on the exposure
this donation drive brought the project, we've seen tens if not
hundreds of hours of volunteer efforts from a number of great
contributors.

But we're still short of a couple goals. I have 104.75 hours that I
pledge that I will try as hard as I can to do between now and RubyConf
2008. Having this remaining pledged time is a good motivator, because
we've fallen short of two key objectives:

1. Prawn is not yet integrated with Ruport
2. Prawn has performance issues with a number of its core
features.

These things need to be addressed, and will be top priorities in the
coming weeks.

On the bright side of things, the rate of adoption of Prawn is
absolutely staggering. Most people report that it is 'fast enough'
for their needs, so long as they haven't hit some of our edge cases
where things tend to really slow down (embedding a ton of large fonts
or images). People seem to love the 'feel' of the library. The
documentation is good, and the code is readable. Most core
functionality has specs. People are filing bug reports and feature
requests. People are submitting patches. In short, this project is
full of more win in a period of less than 6 months than I could muster
up in over 3 years of Ruport's development.

For me, I feel like this project was a big success. There are some
things I'd do differently, and some things I wish I accomplished that
I wasn't able to, but in general, I think that folks got their money's
worth and will continue to get even more as I finish my leftover
commitment.

After the pledged hours are completed, I certainly have no plans to
abandon Prawn. In fact, I'd like to keep working on it, and with
promise of a contract here or there to assist commercial projects
using the library, I think we'll see things continue at a fast pace.

I hope that hours wise, people understand that I sort of under-
budgeted myself time and moneywise, and this is why I'm currently at
76% of the target rather than 100%. I hope that progress-wise,
despite the fact that Prawn is not yet in Ruport and that more work
needs to be done on performance, that the library is already useful
for some and interesting to many. I hope that folks trust in my
commitment to free software development, and believe me when I say
that this project will be a top priority until I feel like I've
reached all the goals I set out for it. Of course, I need to pay my
bills, keep my commercial clients from getting too frustrated, keep my
girlfriend happy, and pass my school courses. After that, Prawn (and
Ruby Mendicant), will continue to be a major focus until things are
downright awesome. If people like what they see now, they'll really
love what's to come.

I will be speaking at the International RubyConf 2008, and will have a
written post-mortem about the Ruby Mendicant program by then
(including the much overdue acknowledgements page). I hope that folks
will come find me at the conference and say hello.

So, the next announcement on this list will be the post-mortem, due
out some time before or around November 4th. I encourage folks who
are interested in Prawn to join that mailing list, as I won't continue
to make progress reports here now that the program has finished.

Thank you so much for your donations, support, and everything else
that has made this crazy idea of mine into a reality. It was a blast.

-greg