Ben Morgan I/O

https://github.com/spree/spree/pull/6918

I’m sorry Spree. Its not you, its me. I’m not the right developer for you. Not a lot of developers are the right ones for you. But, maybe you’ve found one. And that’s great. I’m dating this new girl. Her names Solidus and we get a long a lot better. I’m sorry Spree, but we broke up.

I hope that the future is bright for you. I’m happy you’re receiving maintenance and that the future looks brighter for you. I hope you find happiness in the future.

I’m writing this letter because I need you to know that there’s a wound in my heart. A while back, a piece of my heart had your name on it, Spree. With FirstData coming into our relationship, we knew things had to end and we needed to both move on. This letter is so that we can move on from each other.

To help this process, I’m using George Lucas’s three commandments of break ups.

1. I will not phone call Spree.
2. I will not drive by Spree’s house and see what she’s doing.
3. I will not show up at her coffee shop.

I’m sorry Spree, but we broke up. Not watching. Unstaring. And most importantly: we can’t fork anymore.

A long time ago Spree was the go to ecommerce framework for Rails. For those who don’t know, Spree had a lot of bugs. But no one really beat the contributors up on it. Everyone knew: ecommerce is hard.

Over time, the contributors started to disappear. Their Github said they still worked for Spreecommerce, but they were gone. No contributions. Where did they go?

Then Ryan Bigg quit.

You could feel the cogs turning inside of Spreecommerce. Should we support Spree or keep supporting SpreeHub? Then boom! SpreeHub was renamed to Wombat with an all new admin. Now we know what everyone was working on. Now we knew where Spreecommerce was investing in.

We hoped that once Wombat was doing good, they’d focus more time back on Spree. Unfortunately, this never paid off for the Spree community. Spree only had one core contributor and you could tell he was working on the project part time. The most popular ecommerce framework was being neglected.

And so, the community wanted access to the “merge” button. They weren’t getting it. You had to work for Spreecommerce. So, what did the unsung heroes of Spree do? They forked it.

Tons of tiny bug fixes enter Spree. Tons of new and amazing features ended up in Solidus. Solidus was even fix long outstanding bugs. They were on point.

I’m moving to Solidus, are you?

Sometimes, when someone is making a recommendation on why they think something is a best practice, they’ll reference a blog post. What’s great about a blog post is that there’s people (like me) that will explain simply why something is a good implementation and why you should do it too.

But here’s the thing, if you look into my blog archive, you’ll discover that you should store Twitter configuration in a global variable. (I broke a production app by implementing that. Worst part: its recommended on the twitter ruby client readme…) I have other _bad_ recommendations as well that I’m sure even a junior dev can find. Don’t trust me.

Oh, but wait, I’m a good dev. I’m a core contributor to Spree! I have to have at least some idea how to program. I mean, I do help out on the biggest ecommerce framework for ruby on rails.

So, why are blog posts bad references? They aren’t peer reviewed and they don’t contain other peoples opinions. You might get another persons opinion, but that’s only if you check the comments; if they have comments turned on and guess what: I don’t.

What are some reliable resources? Popular Stackoverflow questions with tons of activity.

Actually, nvm. I’ve changed my mind. This is now a blog post that is here to be-all-end-all to the discussion of what is a valid reference. Blog posts (especially the ones where comments are turned off) are now the go to reference.

Anonymous asked: Sir, i am getting a compatibility error for spree auth devise gem while installing spree using your method. Could you please tell me which ruby/rails version should i use?

Which Spree version are you using? 3.0 is for rails 4.2 and 2.3/2.4 is for rails 4.1. If you’re getting an incompatibility error, maybe also point spree_auth_devise to the same gem version.