We had another Newer Yankee Workshop on Tuesday, following the success of our previous Cucumber session in our new office.

Build-a-Gem 1 Build-a-Gem 2

We started by reviewing gem basics – what it is, how it’s made, how it’d distributed, etc. Then we jumped into a simple hello-world project using the venerable Jeweler. Greg Sterndale then took the driver’s seat and walked us through “gemifying” an existing project (which happens to be a pretty useful library to talk to Nextbus, the provider of future MBTA bus data, among many other agencies).

We then paired up and started hacking our own gems. There were are few that used the Massachusetts RMV wait time feed (like Bouvier, by yours truly and Jay). I saw one team playing with Last.fm’s API and one that even ran python code (for some reason).

It was a good session and I’m looking a next one on a topic TBD.. Maybe using a NoSQL database, Rails 3, Rack-ifying a feature, or something else?

UPDATE: simple-twilio is another one by Pascal and Jeff