Open source (pour over pasta)

I've been making a real effort to tidy up my open source portfolio recently; getting issues closed, code tidied up, unit test suites written and on the fantastic Travis and people happier!

As part of this transition, I've decided to retire Sparkplugs and open source the code. Big changes are happening in my professional and personal life over the next few months and I feel it would be disingenuous to pretend that I could carry on supporting and developing my formerly commercial add-ons. After all, there haven’t been any updates to my add-ons for a while now, and support has been flakey. The honest truth is I lost my passion.

But onto bigger and better things!

Exciting things are going on over at my GitHub page (https://github.com/jamierumbelow). You’ll find my two most popular CodeIgniter libraries, MY_Model and MY_Controller. You'll find a recent experiment with node.js, Postmaster, an SMTP testing server I'm remarkably proud of. 

Also, you'll find the source to Sparkplugs' two commercial add-ons, Taggable and MojoBlog. I’m sure I’ll still be involved and am happy to answer any support questions through the issue trackers on the GitHub repositories.

It's an exciting time to be in open source and I've realised that I enjoy the atmosphere so much more than the pressures of a commercial add-on retailer.

So go on. Check out my GitHub profile :)

EllisLab CEO Reports

I’m absolutely thrilled to see that the brilliant Leslie Camacho, former President and newly inaugurated CEO of EllisLab, is taking yet another step forward to get in touch with the community. He has written the first of what will be quarterly reports on the inner goings on at EllisLab.

I have a lot of time for Les, so it has been intriguing to read about his plans for EllisLab and the way he sees the company heading forward.

This quarter he’s discussed the growth of EllisLab - even some figures, 35% growth is impressive! - as well as discussed what he is hoping to do with the company over the coming year. This includes changes and updates to their core set of products, as well as updates to internal services.

I’m guessing ‘internal services’ means the support system and forum, bug tracker, shop and downloads centre. It would also be great to see an update to the product release and update mechanisms; these are at the heart of their products and frankly, decompressing .zip files and moving files is getting archaic.

Needless to say, It’s an interesting read and one I’d be sure you check out if you’ve got anything to do with ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter or MojoMotor. Stay subscribed to these reports as they’re bound to be informative.

Read the new CEO report over at the EllisLab blog.