GitHub Rebase #9

The middle of December has brought us a few feet of snow and the return of graphs! I’m looking for new ways to show off the ridiculous amount of data available on the site (just over 67,000 events in total last week), so if you have any ideas feel free to let me know.

Stats Breakdown

Featured Project*

passenger is quickly becoming the new standard for easy and robust Rails deployment. Also known as mod_rails, this is an Apache module that makes the process of getting your application published and out there so good it’s almost boring. Installation and configuration are dead simple, and it’s being constantly improved and benchmarked against competing deployment systems. If you need more convincing to try it out, RubyInside has a fantastic collection of blog posts, discussions, and tutorials to help you get started.

Notably New Projects

grancher is a helpful little tool that can copy files from one git branch to another. This is awesome for those who have their project’s documentation or other files living in their repositories already but want to move them easily to the gh-pages branch. Check out judofyr’s blog post on how this can be done or Grancher’s docs for everything that it can do.

gaebar stands for Google App Engine Backup and Restore. It’s a Django module that helps with pulling down, backing up, and restoring data on your GAE. What’s really neat is that it stores your data as Python code, and then simply runs that code to bring your data back. If your apps are running off this platform gaebar might just be for you (or if you’re worried about Google ever going down).

mytime is a GTD time tracking tool that is used through the system tray. It’s very alpha right now, but I really like the goals of the project: timed todo lists, tagging for tasks, and plenty of reports to track your time. If you’re looking to get into Java, returning to it, or perhaps want to hone your Swing skills a little, this is a small little project that would be fun to hack on.

Hardcore Forker of the Week

John Resig (jeresig) is the definition of a JavaScript guru. He’s most widely known for creating jQuery (and his blog), but he’s also been hacking on plenty of projects here on GitHub. From processing-js, a port of the Processing language, to fireunit, a Firebug extension for JS unit testing, this guy is just unstoppable. Recently he’s been working on sizzle, a new CSS selector engine that may be used across many different JS libraries. Some of the coolest stuff coming out in JavaScript is from him, so he’s definitely worth following (and rocking out with).

*I had marked Shoes as the featured project when this post first came out, but it had already been featured a while back. Still check it out though, it’s fantastic.

Written by

Nick Quaranto

@qrush