gem.coop update #1

Hello from the gem.coop engineers!

This is our first newsletter. We’ll be sending these out whenever we feel there’s something useful to say, to keep you all updated on our progress. You can follow along via email or via RSS feed at https://gem.coop/index.xml. If you were forwarded this email and you want to sign up, go to gem.coop and enter your email there.

Traffic report

In October, gem.coop served

That’s quite a lot of gems! Thanks for trusting us as your gem server. It’s exciting to see so many people using gem.coop and we can’t wait to introduce some of the new features for the community.

Governance progress

We have open-sourced our governance documents and processes, based on Homebrew’s governance, at github.com/gem-coop/governance. We are following a public bootstrapping process, and so far we have offered voting membership to everyone Mike McQuaid listed as writing, approving, or merging at least one pull request to RubyGems within the last year, using the brew contributions CLI tool.

Our next step is for everyone who agreed to vote to actually use those votes to choose the members of the Project Leadership and Technical Steering groups.

Infrastructure & hosting

We launched gem.coop using Fastly’s Edge Compute, and it has worked extremely well so far. During October, we applied to join the Fast Forward program at Fastly, which provides free hosting for open source projects, including RubyGems.org, PyPI, Rust’s crates.io, the Curl project, and many others. We found Fastly to be reliable and helpful partners when we worked with them on RubyGems.org, and we are looking forward to working with them again on our new efforts.

Coming up next

We have a lot of ideas! We’re working on experiments around faster indexes and gem installation, offering namespaced gem servers for existing gem clients, and building client support for multiple gem namespaces inside a single server.

If you’d like to participate, we have created a channel in the Bundler Slack named #gem-coop that is open to everyone. We would love to discuss or work together on ideas for the future of gem hosting. It’s also the first place you’ll hear about some of the things we’re testing.

See you next time,
The Gem Co-op Team