Michał Łomnicki

I’m greatly impressed how Wrocław Ruby User Group is doing. We’ve just started working on open-source ruby projects in addition to cyclic meetings. The idea is simple. We want to improve our skills, create software we need and have some fun.

At our first meeting we’ve worked on exceptioner. It’s swiss army knife meant to replace hoptoad and the likes. Shortly, we’re not satisfied with available solutions and want to provide something significantly better.

Exceptioner can work in 2 modes: offline and online. Offline mode is similar to exception_notification. It delivers information about exceptions through your local system. Online mode works as hoptoad does. Your exceptions are pushed to external server which notifies you and provides nice WWW interface to manage the exceptions. Our unique feature are different delivery methods. Exceptions may be pushed traditionally via email but also via jabber, IRC or campfire. We also plan to add support for bunch of project management tools. Support for redmine is done already.

Exceptioner is currently in early stage although it is used in some working rails projects.

We’ve worked on exceptioner about 6 hours. Our team consited of 7 developers who have made piece of amazing work. I think it’s worth to describe what each of use has done:

Paweł Pacana - Generally speaking he came with the idea of hackathon. Paweł developed our website along with voting system for hackathon ideas. He has worked on HTTP API and web interface for exceptioner. It’s crucial part of the project so I’m really happy Paweł has taken care about it.

Piotr Niełacny/LiTE - His story is quite funny. One day he came to bookstore to buy some python book. There was none so he bought a ruby one. Obviously he has become a passionate ruby developer. Piotr added support for IRC. Thanks to that contribution you can even talk with IRC bot about exceptions when you feel alone!

Darek Gertych - He has joined our group recently but immediately has made a great impact. He added support for redmine. It seemed to be really easy for him! Darek has some qualitative thoughts on testing external services. What’s more he promised to prepare presentation about continuous integration systems for next DRUG.

Jan Dudek - He admits he’s newcomer to ruby world although I’m really impressed how he is doing. You would have thought he is quite experienced developer after talking with him for some time. Janek added easy jabber setup through rake tasks. As far as I know he’s available for hire so don’t wait until it will be too late!

Łukasz Śliwa - His contribution was the most unsaspected one. When the hackathon was almost finished we’ve received pull request from Łukasz who was working at home. He added support for Campfire. Fortunately he joined us later at afterparty. Among strong Ruby skills Łukasz is facebook apps master. Ask him about any function from their API and he will describe each bug it has!

Marcin Jędras - Thanks to him we had everything computer enginner needs - chair, desk and WiFi. He invited us to his conference room. As a CEO he’s quite busy so he wasn’t able to contribute but at least he pointed us to great pizza ;)

Marcin Pietraszek/kbl - He started the hackathon pointing a mistake in my last talk. Point for him, shame on me. Unfortunately he has some troubles with his laptop so he wasn’t able to contribute. Let’s hope he’ll make up for it next time.

Besides of having really good time I’ve also contributed some features. In particular I added dispatching hooks. There are dozens of ideas for further features and there is a lot of work to do. I frankly believe Exceptioner will play a big role in exceptions market :) First RC will be out soon!

Next Hackathon on 26 February. Don’t hesitate to join us! It will be even better than now.