A few years ago, I found RefactorMyCode.com by accident while searching for programming tips. I registered on the site right away because I liked the way it fostered sharing code with other programmers. It was a strong community that I wanted to be a part of.

Three months ago when I began my career at Intridea, I was prompted to select a SparkTime Project to work on in my spare time. At Intridea we are encouraged to work on interesting projects as often as we can. The SparkTime initiative allows us to organize our efforts and team up to accomplish things more efficiently. I was surprised when I found that RefactorMyCode was on the SparkTime list, so I signed up happily to help out.

About RefactorMyCode

One of my colleagues, Jon, talked about the RefactorMyCode project two months ago in a blog post. It was originally running on Rails 2.0.2, which was really out of date. Thus, I decided to upgrade it to Rails 3.0 before open-sourcing it.

What's new with RefactorMyCode in last few months?

Upgrading from Rails 2.0.2 to Rails 3.0 has been time consuming since there is a two year gap between the two versions. The main difficulties have been to fix routes and ajax related issues. In this situation the rails_upgrade plugin has really helped out.

In our case, it helped to cancel some of the ajax requests and refactor them as direct requests for more flexibility. We removed the old will_paginate and used kaminari as the new pagination solution. Similar updates included upgrading to acts-as-taggable-on and syntax highlight functions with coderay.

We also refactored the existing authentication solution with omniauth, so the new Rails 3 version will allow you to login to RefactorMyCode via more third party services, such as Github, Twitter and LinkedIn etc.

Is It Ready for open source?

The answer is, YES! Or, yes, almost!

However, I am still adding RSpec test code to the Rails 3 version and I am also on the hunt for a better (pure Ruby) syntax highlighting solution. So far it seems that Albino will end up working well for this. The project will be open sourced very soon (in the next 1-2 weeks), and we'll make an announcement about that here on our blog and our Twitter account. We are looking forward to involving the community in this project!