A few weeks ago I released a fun little project as part of whyday called ruby_chopped.

The idea is modeled after the Food Network show where expert chefs are given a basket of random items and told to make a dish from the contents. In the same way, ruby_chopped creates a project for you with a random set of gems, and asks you to do something great with them.

It was a fun project for several reasons:

1. I had never built a gem with an accompanying command line executable. Good learning there. (And even more through the pull requests…)
2. People wanted to add stuff to it! Within the first 5 or 6 hours I had two pull requests to greatly improve the executable and the way projects were built. Within 24 hours there were 2 more with additional options and features.
3. Not only did it allow for others to contribute to OSS, but gave me chance to contribute to a different OSS project…more on that later.

All in all a great time and another reminder that sometimes this hobby turned job can still be a fun hobby!