Open “fucking” source

Rather boring story of my experience doing the open source thingy.

If you’re one of those people, like myself, that spend their days staring at a code editor and nights doing exactly the same thing, you’re familiar with the image above, Github’s contribution heatmap. This is the story of how we checked out some green boxes.

The first version of Cruncher supports only GTB. It was the only bank I needed at the moment, and I couldn’t be bothered about the others. During the planning for this Version 2 however, I realised I could separate the statement parsing bit of the app into a separate service. At the same time, Akin and I from Devcenter were contemplating ways to engage developers through open source ideas. Akin suggested I meld those two needs into one.

We decided to reach out to a group of Ruby devs from the community to help build the open source bank statement parser. I learnt a couple of things on this experience

1. Creating a base structure for open source collaboration is really hard
   - From learning to work in a similar pattern, writing general tests, working with deadlines and timelines, creating a support system for random people to work together is some work
2. Community projects inspire learning.
   - While we worked, no one wanted to be seen as the slacker. We learnt things we had to. Everyone was eager to keep up.
3. Code readability is a dev priority
   - The importance of this can’t be over-flogged. Write code like the next person is going to try to read it. Define variable names as simply and explicit as possible, space properly and comment anywhere your code can’t explain itself, use short precise functions!
4. The feeling of pushing work with strangers live is amazing.

Gem Homepage — http://devcenter-square.github.io/ng-bank-parser/

PS: I’ve been working on a dashboard idea for the new Cruncher. You can drop feedback for me here https://invis.io/ZX42X7VEQ. Thanks!