Say hello to REBIN: a five-minute web service for all of your binaries and scripts.

The New York Times Hack Day event this past weekend was incredible fun and a great success. We had an amazing time participating at the New York Times Science Fair last month, and were really honored to be invited back

Looks like we can’t get enough of the New York Times. After a spectacular day at the New York Times Open Source Science Fair last month, we’re headed...

This past weekend I participated in Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hosted by the OpenGov Hub in DC. I was extra excited this time around because RHoK was being held alongside the first ever Sanitation Hackathon, an event that tries to find technological solutions to some of the very serious sanitation problems around the world.

On Nov 15, a strange species known as “Intrideans” descended upon Manhattan. Armed with posterboard, sticky tape,...

Hello Manhattan! We’re thrilled to be taking part as an exhibitor at the NYTimes Open Source Science Fair...

Don't cry. We've all been there too. Regression issues in the presentation layer make the entire team go crazy. Why can't we have a methodical way of testing the UI to ensure once designs are styled as views, they stay the way that they were created?

Can you believe it? It's actually time to start writing the code for your gem! Now, in this part of the guide you'll be more "on your own" than up to this point. I don't know what kind of open source library you're writing, whether it's an extension to an existing library, a simple utility, or a complex, sprawling project that will change the face of development forever. What I do know, however, is that there are some common things that you may want to do that have community best practices attached.

A good toolchain is important for any development project. It makes the lives of developers easier by abstracting away or automating repetitive tasks. You should always spend some time at the outset of a project making sure you're using all of the best tools available. On an open source project this is 10 times more important. Instead of building a toolchain that will be used by your company or small team, you're building a toolchain that will potentially be used by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other developers.

Eureka! You've thought of a new idea for an open source library. Perhaps you already have some code tucked away in your application that you're extracting into a library, or perhaps you're starting from scratch. Either way, your next step is going to be setting up a gem folder to which you can then add code, tests, and documentation. As we saw previously, RubyGems are simply folders that follow certain patterns. You can build one from scratch quite easily, but luckily we have some tools that make it even easier.

Building an open source library can be a daunting task if you've never done it before. How should I structure the project? What do I need to include in terms of documentation? What tools can I use to make my library friendly for others to contribute?

2012 is here and Intrideans celebrated the end of one year and the beginning of another across the world - in Shanghai, NYC, DC, San Francisco, Italy, and places in between.

We could write a customary "year in review" post detailing the various milestones we met in 2011; how Inc 500 rated us as the 33rd fastest growing privately-held software company in the country; or we could talk about the explosive growth of our team and how we penetrated the enterprise software market with a new suite of enterprise collaboration tools. Or we could talk about how our talented design team has been racking up awards all year.

But we won't do that. Because although we're incredibly proud of our growth and achievements in 2011 and would love the chance to rant on about them we realize that you've probably already heard enough about them. So instead we're going to look 2012 directly in the eyes and and share with you what we see:

I've been following the progress of Mozilla's BrowserID for some time now, and I'm a big fan. Having dove much deeper than most into the quagmire of fragmented authentication I've reached the same conclusion that Mozilla has: ultimately, authentication is a function that should belong to the user agent.

Today I'm happy to announce that OmniAuth version 1.0.0 has been released into the wild. The result of more than a month of heavy development, the newest version of OmniAuth brings along with it a slate of new features, a whole new structure, and the tools to let OmniAuth be your only authentication library. The one thing that hasn't changed is OmniAuth's mission: to assume nothing about how your app works and what you want to do with authentication.

Last Friday I decided to celebrate _whyday by taking a departure from my normal open source path and writing some Javascript (well, technically Coffeescript). So today we're announcing Sketch.js, a simple jQuery library to enable HTML5 Canvas "sketchpads" for any web application.

You might think there's not really anything to being a good user of open source. Install the library, use it how you need it, and move on. And honestly, for the most part that's a fine thing to do. But if you want to be more than one of the silent users, if you want to help the projects you use just by using them, there are lots of ways to do it. You could become a vital part of pushing forward your favorite open source projects without ever altering a single line of code.

In April, I announced GemNotifier, a new Intridea SparkTime project. GemNotifier is a web app I created to send notifications to users when the gems they subscribe to are updated.

Today, I'm excited to announce that we are open sourcing GemNotifier. At Intridea, we have a long history of support for open source development, and we make every effort to open source tools and projects that can be of use to the greater development community.

Earlier this week we gave you some updates on the RefactorMyCode project that we took over from its creator, Marc-André Cournoyer this April. When we made the announcement that we were taking over RefactorMyCode.com, we let everyone know that we intended to open source the project eventually. That day has come!

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.

I had the opportunity to speak at RailsConf 2011 about OmniAuth, outlining some of the reasoning behind it as well as some current and upcoming features of Intridea's own "authenticate with anything" middleware. While the session wasn't video recorded, a little trick I've picked up is to run a screencasting program in the background while I present to generate a "poor man's Confreaks" version of the talk. Well, that's exactly what I've done for OmniAuth: From the Ground Up!

For a software developer there are essentially two paths to extremely enviable positions of respect in the community: either you can be the tech genius behind a multi-billion dollar startup or you can release open source projects that thousands (not millions) of developers find useful. Guess which one is easier to accomplish?

Companies have many ways to benefit from an open source culture. While many arguments can be made about the philisophical implications of choosing to contribute to the open source community, at the end of the day philosophy isn't going to persuade any CEO to adopt open source. The real reason that open source culture is important to a business is because it's a business decision that can bring many real-world advantages over the proprietary-focused alternatives.

Intridea has taken over RefactorMyCode from Marc-André Cournoyer. We will continue to maintain the site and also will be posting an open source version to our Intridea Github account by the end of the week.

RailsWizard v3 brings unprecedented ease to the rapid generation of new Rails applications via its unique template builder system.

I'm pleased to announce Profanity Filter for Rails. This gem filters undesirable words from text and displays a friendly version. Filtering is non-destructive by default but has the option of replacing the original text. It's based on a dictionary that is customizable so you can add additional words as needed.

There's a problem in the software development world, a practice that breaks down the free and open exchange of information. This practice is widespread throughout the software development world and can lead to a lock-in mindset that is damaging for the advancement of the community as a whole. I'm talking, of course, about copyleft licenses such as the GPL.

The web application landscape has changed drastically in the past year or two. Where once every site was a silo unto itself and could reasonably expect users to create a unique login and password for each site, it is now a different story. I sigh every time I have to fill out yet another registration form, wishing instead for a simple "Connect with Facebook", "Sign in with Twitter", or "Log in with OpenID". At the same time, services are more interconnected than ever. One of the best ways to increase the popularity and viability of a new service is by piggybacking it onto the existing user bases of apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare.

This week Twitter launched the official “Tweet Button,” a button for website owners to count RT’s and let readers easily share content. Mashable was first to report on this shiny new button, but we’re the first to release a Ruby on Rails gem for your next project.

As library authors it is our duty to try to support as large a part of the community as possible and do so in a friendly manner. To that end, today we’re releasing MultiJSON, a simple library that allows you to seamlessly provide multiple JSON backends for your library with intelligent defaulting.

While I’d been tracking with great interest the progress of OAuth 2.0, Facebook lit off the powderkeg yesterday by announcing that their entire API was moving to the protocol (as well as to RESTful JSON). As a developer who had been constantly confounded by the relentlessly hostile environment that Facebook seemed to present to developers, yesterday was a sudden and welcome about-face. The acquisition of FriendFeed, it seems, gave Facebook the talent they needed to do it right this time.

But anyway, on to the news! We have just released a gem for OAuth 2.0 to work with the new Facebook API. You can get it right now:

If you’ve taken a look at Mustache, the “stupid in a good way” templating engine, you might know that there are also Javascript Mustache renderers such as Mustache.js. Today we’ve released a small library called mustache_json that allows you to compile your Mustache view objects into JSON, allowing them to be interpreted by Javascript Mustache rendering engines.