Open Sourcing a Gem: Part 1

The Signalman gem's origins

As any company grows, it reaches a point where it is no longer in the "startup phase". No longer can the target market arbitrarily be redefined or features be pushed out at a whim. At this point, analytics and A/B testing become increasingly important. A few years ago, we found this to be a point of pain at CustomInk and sought to create a more robust solution to meet our needs. Thus Signalman was born.

Though Signalman has evolved since its conception, its primary function has remained to make A/B testing easier and easily repeatable.

Why are we open sourcing the gem?

The real question is why not? We found that Signalman seemed to cover a general enough use case that it would be applicable to other teams outside of CustomInk. Since Signalman would be helpful to other teams doing split testing, then it is clear that open sourcing the gem would be beneficial to the community. As a team, we use a lot of open source software, in fact, most of our stack is composed of open source projects. We are heavy consumers of open source so we like to return the favor whenever we can. Open sourcing a project also can provide the benefit of users outside of the organization improving the gem itself, which is an added bonus.

Stay tuned for future posts leading up to Signalman's public release that will highlight various details in the process of open sourcing a gem.

More from this series

Part 2

by Jonathan Lehman