February 4, 2011

Hey, what’s up with Machinist?

I'm looking for a Melbourne pairing buddy for a couple of evenings (or a day on a weekend) to help me get Machinist moving again. Ping me on Twitter if you’re interested. (I'm happy to trade some time pairing on your open source project and/or buy you a beer or three.)

Machinist hasn’t had much love from me for a while. I did a beta release in the middle of last year, and haven’t really touched it since.

I'm officially declaring the main feature of that beta release (object caching) a failure. It’s a nice theory, but the side-effects of ActiveRecord object creation are too hard to track in practice. For a while now, I've been advising people to simply turn off caching.

So the lack of activity on Machinist is a combination of me being demoralised by my abject failure to come up with a compelling beta for Machinist 2, and generally being busy with my job at Envato.

That said, we use the Machinist 2 beta on Envato’s very large codebase, and there are plenty of people out there using both Machinist 1 and 2, so it’s far from dead. A little bit of spit and polish, and it shouldn’t be hard to get things moving again!