Welcome everybody to the first Open Source Retreat!

[kaspth]

@alexandreruban @ashwin47 @codergeek121 @diogochaves @felipedmesquita @lape @larkro @manuraj17 @mikepmunroe @mingabire @ricardotk002 @sahglie @salochara @thomasklemm @willcosgrove

Hey everybody, thank you for joining! I'm really excited to see what we can do with this format.

So for the next 3 months I'm going to be building out Oaken, which is going to have these parts:

• Part 1. Most Rails apps struggle with building test data, and the default YML Fixtures are tough to wrap your head around using. So people opt for Factories, which are fine at first, but can become messy as apps grow. I have some ideas for blending these two in new ways.

• Part 2. Once we've got nicer fixtures, we'll look at establishing new concepts that'll let us wrap database seeds as well. Particularly letting database seeds become a superset of test fixtures.

• Part 3. We'll introduce some more organizational concepts to help users think about their app's Object Graph through their test and seed structure.

• Part 4? We'll see how the other parts play out first, but I have some ideas for an alternative to generate model data.

That's the code part and I'll be building it out over PRs so you can follow along. This retreat shouldn't feel like you have to do anything beyond reading and building context. I'll be in the drivers seat, and then as we get on, I'll try to open things up more for contribution. To that end, I recommend you watch the repo to be sent an email for every comment on here, but I'll also provide a weekly announcement recap for you.

I'm intending to keep the volume low but consistent each week — keeping up with this shouldn't feel like a second full-time job for y'all. That's also why we're doing 3 months, so we can let the ideas in here bloom a little more — or change the path if it's not good (I'm not perfect and I make mistakes sometimes too).

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I encourage you to chime in as much as you like. Feel free to open issues and comment on PRs. There's no such thing as a "dumb question" here.

I recommend introducing yourself in a comment below here. I'm also curious to know what you're looking to get out of this, something you're hoping to learn or see in particular? What's been scary for you about Open Source?

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Ok, I'm going to be pushing the first PR up shortly, which is just going to lay some foundations with some of the ideas I've had to set the stage. Thanks again, everybody!

[mikepmunroe]

Hi all. Mike Munroe here, founder of OBLSK. I have some open source contributions and comfortable with forking, rebasing, and opening OSS PRs. I learn a lot from reading others code and I've seen some of Kasper's work in OSS previously. I joined because I thought this was a cool format to follow along and see if I can pick some things up here or there.

[kaspth]

Hi Mike, welcome!

[codergeek121]

Hi,
I'm Niklas Häusele. I'm working at a german Rails consultancy as a Rails developer. Most of the Rails projects I have ever worked on use RSpec and Factorybot, but one uses Minitest and Rails vanilla fixtures. There's not a lot of material out there on how bigger projects use fixtures, so I'm interested in any information about it. Besides the typical effects of fixtures (e.g. way faster tests) I come to like fixtures a lot, particulary because of some downstream effects:

• rails db:fixtures:load gives me a good set of default data in development
• Having a defined set of development data makes e.g. mailer previews very easy to work with

But I miss some convenience in the Rails API when writing tests. For example a test where I want to use a fixture but change a single attribute. I'm pretty confident that a hybrid solution would probably be the best of both worlds.

I'd be pretty interested in the gem and ideas behind it. One scary part of Open source has always been on how to approach big contributions. I managed to fix small stuff or add small features, but never managed to contribute something "bigger". Also I really like the format, where I can just follow in my own pace or even contribute or ask question. Thanks :)

[kaspth]

Hey Niklas, welcome!

rails db:fixtures:load gives me a good set of default data in development

That's cool, I'd forgotten this task works in development too.

Having a defined set of development data makes e.g. mailer previews very easy to work with

Yeah, I'm hoping we can do something for this too. I've also been thinking about whether this gem should help make demo modes easier in apps. So you could have a sign-in in production for some demo data that you can use for marketing screenshots/videos or other testing. We'll see.

But I miss some convenience in the Rails API when writing tests. For example a test where I want to use a fixture but change a single attribute.

The existing fixtures should let you do this too posts(:first).update title: "new title", and since tests are wrapped in transactions those changes are rolled back before the next test.

[willcosgrove]

Howdy 👋

I'm Will. I'm a solo Rails contractor. I've been spending most of my time over the last few years with one client, acting as their CTO. I saw a tweet about this project and thought it looked like a good learning opportunity. The app I'm spending most of my time in is a large e-commerce monolith with a practically non-existent test suite. I'm working to fix that, but one of the biggest challenges we've faced in testing is with fixture data. So the subject matter of this gem was also of interest.

Looking forward to following along!

[kaspth]

Hi Will, welcome!

What's the challenges with the fixture data? It's tough to get started or tough to make any headway with it? Sometimes I've found that it's difficult to tie find the naming to tie fixtures together. I'm hoping to tackle some of that here.

[ricardotk002]

Hi all! Ricardo Díaz here, I'm a software developer based in Lima - Perú.

I have some experience in OSS, I've sent a few PRs to Rails that made it to main, and also to other Ruby projects; however I've never had the chance to author a project myself. I'm a curious person, so most of the times I find myself reading source code from any libraries just to understand how it works behind scenes. I'm really interested in learning how a OSS project is started, prepared for release and shared with the community from different perspectives: code-wise, project-management-wise or even marketing-wise.

Similarly to other members in this cohort, I'm mostly experienced with FactoryBot when it comes to create test data to verify any workflow in an app. I've used this gem for many projects at work, and I understand the issues it creates when a codebase grows and the data flows and relationships between models become large. It'll be interesting to see if oaken could become a good alternative to fixtures and factories.

[kaspth]

Hey Ricardo, welcome!

Honestly, that you're already reading other libraries that's huge.

I've used [FactoryBot] for many projects at work, and I understand the issues it creates when a codebase grows and the data flows and relationships between models become large.

Yeah, my issue with it is that you don't get anything for free. There's no inherent connective tissue. You want a part of an object graph, not the individual pieces and having to rediscover how to build the object graph for every new test.

[alexandreruban]

Hello there 👋

I'm Alexandre, I'm a Rails developer from France.

I'm really excited to be here, I think this is a very cool format to learn new things and contribute to open-source. I joined because:

• I think the format is really interesting and it's going to be great to contribute to a gem as a small group
• I think the topic of test/seed data is very interesting too
• I've followed Kasper's work for quite some time and I learned a lot from his open-source contributions

Looking forward to following along!

[kaspth]

Hey Alexandre, welcome!

[lape]

Hello, nice to meet y'all 👋

I'm Lars, an independent consultant and developer from Germany. After working with Drupal for many years, I decided it's time for something completely different and picked up Rails two years ago. And I'm absolutely loving it!

In my projects I have stayed with Minitest, fixtures and some FactoryBot so far. I also think this format is a very cool idea and I'm excited to learn more about Rails development and open-source contribution.

[kaspth]

Hey @lape, welcome!

[felipedmesquita]

Hello everyone,

I'm Felipe, a Rails developer from Brazil.
In this retreat, I hope to develop my intuition regarding open-source etiquette. As someone new to contributing to open source, I feel uncertain whether I should open an issue, try coding up a fix and create a pr, or how I could efficiently help maintainers with chores like triaging issues and updating documentation. I definitely don’t want to burden a volunteer maintainer of a busy project with guiding me through these initial steps. Participating in this retreat feels like a respectful and structured way to learn these nuances, and I’m also interested in watching a Rails gem be built in realtime by Kasper.

[kaspth]

Hi Felipe, welcome! I'm gonna keep these in mind as I'm going.

[sahglie]

Hi, I'm Steven, a Rails developer from the California Bay Area. Although I've made a few minor contributions to various Ruby gems, I am interested to see how someone else builds a gem like this from scratch. When testing Rails apps, I primarily use fixtures due to their speed and ease of use. Although I'll admit sometimes fixture data can get out of control and gets hard to maintain. So I'm also interested to see what others are doing in this area. Excited to be able to follow along.

[kaspth]

Hi Steven, welcome!

[larkro]

Hi, I’m Lars
From Sweden but for the time being in Belgium, on sick leave from work, due to lots of family/personal stuff.
Made my living working in IT for well over 20+ years, from network engineer to CIO/CTO. Solved problems in multiple languages/application/areas/domains, been all over the place, feels like I touched almost everything ever used in IT but I never been paid to use Ruby. Instead Ruby been my goto language for my private projects. Still dreaming of building my own Rails app that will .… :-)

I’m here because I want to participate in something meaningful, without the pressure being on me. :-)
Already inspired, looking forward to learning more and also that the experience will speed up my recovery, hoping I can make some contribution later on.
Optimizing for happiness. :-)

[kaspth]

Hi Lars, welcome! I've been through something similar, and it's quite tough, so I hope this will be helpful for you!

[manuelfcreis]

Hey everyone!

I'm Manuel, a rails developer from Lisbon. I've mostly worked remotely for various small companies around Europe. But I also have some experience with data analysis as my background is in economics.

I've mostly worked in private codebases but have always been interested in open projects and specially communication in open projects: How people interact, what are good practices etc.

Very excited to see how this project goes and how this community grows 😄

[kaspth]

Hey @manuelfcreis, welcome!

I've mostly worked in private codebases but have always been interested in open projects and specially communication in open projects: How people interact, what are good practices etc.

This is partly why I recommend watching a repository because it's such a low-key way to learn these things without much effort or need for commitment. Who shows up, how do they communicate, what PRs are accepted, etc. Then that's also an easy to click into PRs and read as much (or as little) of them as you want, and build context for the project that way.

[salochara]

Hello everyone! 👋

I'm Salomón, a Rails developer from Mexico City :)
I've worked in a Ruby on Rails software development company based in Mexico, working with clients in the US. I primarily participated in two projects: an e-commerce platform using Solidus (an awesome Rails e-commerce platform) and another software designed for house service providers (also using Rails).

I've been working with Rails since 2018 and I absolutely love it. And what I want is to give back to this framework a bit of what Rails and its community has given to me.

Currently, I'm the lead teacher in a RoR bootcamp, Le Wagon, in Mexico City. I teach coding to people from diverse backgrounds, using Ruby on Rails.

I signed up to this retreat mainly because:

• I want to contribute to OSS and be an active member in the Rails community
• I've been following Kasper's work for a bit
• I liked the idea of building a gem in public and be able to follow along with a group of people.

Very excited to be part of this! 😃
And good to meet you all!

[kaspth]

Hi Salomón, welcome! Le Wagon is cool, I've heard about it from the guy that ran the local one here in Copenhagen that I know.

[jean-francois-labbe]

Hello from France 👋

I'm a ruby on rails freelancer.
All of the projects I've joined used rspec and factory bot. All of them had issues regarding test speed. I've been able to convince some teams to switch to fixtures. After some struggles the ahh moment always arrives.

Personally I prefer minitest and fixtures.
But I've witnessed some drawbacks with fixtures.

• Hard to follow along across multiple fixtures files when you have many associations.
• Duplication between seed and fixtures when dealing with types table (DeviceTypes, AlertTypes...) Which are seeded in production/dev/test.
• When the model has some callbacks (after_create/save) defined they are not triggered.

[kaspth]

Hi @jean-francois-labbe, welcome! Good points on the fixture drawbacks, I've definitely felt these too.

[manuraj17]

Hello everyone and @kaspth!

I'm Manu, from India - southern part of the country. I have been a Rails developer for many years, starting from a Rails consultancy based in India and currently working in a startup. I have worked on various stages of Rails projects and have first hand experienced how test setups can go bad to worse and especially using fixtures without a care. Also in the current work am doing demo data and seed data is something that is also a bit of trouble and I was also in recent times thinking on how to declaratively define some data relations with constrains so that they get populated on it's own and can be used for demos and testing. So, I am interested to see where this project goes.

I really love to give back to the community and I try to do so whenever I can, my work mostly involves private repositories but recently I contributed to the newrelic_rpm gem which was very fulfilling for me. As such, I want to start doing more and help and contribute wherever I can with the knowledge of ruby I have. I would love to contribute on wherever possible be it triaging or small features or specs. Plus, one of the main reasons was that I wanted to see how such a project grows, and no better way to learn than experience it first hand from experts like @kaspth. I have been following the structure of the project and I can say I am learning a thing or two already. Hopefully, this is just a start and there is more learning coming.

Regards,
Manu

[kaspth]

Hi @manuraj17, welcome!

Also in the current work am doing demo data and seed data is something that is also a bit of trouble and I was also in recent times thinking on how to declaratively define some data relations with constrains so that they get populated on it's own and can be used for demos and testing. So, I am interested to see where this project goes.

Yeah, I've been trying to think of how we could potentially incorporate a demo mode in the seed data as well. So that it would be drastically easier to implement.

[ashwin47]

Hi everyone,

Ashwin here, from India. I have been using Rails for last 5 years. Currently doing freelancing. Apologies for joining late, I missed notifications !. Will try to catch up and contribute. Excited for this new format.

[kaspth]

Hi @ashwin47, welcome! I recommend reading the weekly recaps to get caught up quickly — you can always dive in to the PRs after reading them.

[blvrd]

Hey everyone! Very late to the party here but I'm all caught up on the weekly recaps and PRs. Excited to dig in and continue poking around in the code on my machine.

A couple things I'm looking to get out of this:

1. I've gotten so much value from the work others have done on open-source. I'd love to learn the ropes of contributing to open-source projects so I can do my part. A brand new project seems like a great way to do that.
2. Dealing with seeds, fixtures, and factories in a coherent way is a perennial problem on pretty much every project I've worked on in my career. And it gets harder as a project grows. I'm especially excited about the approach of "object-graphs" over just tables and the conceptual clarity that can help bring to people who are new to a codebase.

[kaspth]

Hi @blvrd, welcome!

1. I keep pushing out on writing a guide with some OSS tips, but I think I should just start and then we can always improve on it.
2. Exactly! I'm pretty hopeful with this approach we're going with.