Updating the on ruby website, in a user centered manner.
Hey, so I like ruby, and have been really enjoying meeting people the Berlin ruby user group. I wanted to give something back.
One of the things I can suck at is talking to interesting people, and then forgetting to connect with them, so we can keep in touch.
There’s a variety of mechanisms for this, but the handy thing is, that the On Ruby site, provides a list of attendees for each event! Nice! However, I’d been finding that increasingly LinkedIn was becoming useful again, and a lot of the people — perhaps the majority, were connecting with me via that medium.
I had a hunch, that it would be useful to add a LinkedIn field to the user profile on the On Ruby site.
So, I asked the owners of the repo, if it had already been discarded as an idea? After all there’s German competitors, and amongst techies LinkedIn has gained a bad reputation-mostly because of irrelevant recruiter spam.
It turns out, Peter was happy to consider such an addition to the site. Great. However, what if it was only him and me, that wanted it? I felt I needed to consult the attendees a bit more to understand their needs. So, with the blessing of the hard working RUG B organiser, Tobias, I wrote to the mailing list, with a survey.
I put quite a bit of effort into the survey, to make it short, relevant and ask none leading questions.
Luckily, it paid off. There was a modest number (34) of responses, and the respondents allowed me to interpret the data and conclude that there was reasonable much demand for LinkedIn which was used by 35% to connect with other attendees.
Great. Lets code it up. This I thought, whilst fairly simple, was an opportunity to work with another local rubyist. So I asked my friend Anna. [Link to Anna’s github?]
This is the point complexity hit. It’s a fairly simple site, but the installation instructions had diverged from the reality, and we initially struggled to get the docker install working in the way that the readme described, but figured out what was going wrong eventually.
[Note: It was more effective to raise this on the github issues, as the community was able to help, than email the owner of the repo. Truth be told, I (Ian) was a little bit worried about looking a fool raising it in public? Was this #ImposterSyndrome? to some degree? ]
We added the code for the LinkedIn field, and then added tests in a similar fashion to the coverage that was already in place for the twitter field. Nothing too rocket scientist about this really. We were please to start the week seeing that the pull request for this had been accepted.
So, from a Product Management point of view. What would you have done differently? What else would you have added? I’m interested as further my career in this area at the moment. Welcome your comments below.
Perhaps they’ll be a part 2, to follow up. Tell me below in the comments what you’d like to know?
Many thanks for reading,
Ian
Ian is an experienced independent technologist that has operated at multiple levels, including as a startup founder, over the last 20 years. He’s looking to further his Product Management career, and is also available as a Ruby On Rails freelance developer. Add him on LinkedIn.
Anna is a knowledgeable Ruby On Rails developer, with a passion in opera a classical music reviewer and startup founder. She is about to develop the first ever community of digital innovators in the opera sector. You can hire her here or via Linkedin.
