One gem a day keeps the tech debt away

Lately, I have been thinking about extracting the blogging engine logic from both alexzagu.com and chalkandchickpeas.com and placing it in a shared Rails engine. This would allow me to work directly on the engine and have both sites benefit from it, instead of duplicating effort each time.

This past week, I decided to make it happen, as there are a lot of things in my engine backlog that I want to implement. I chose to start the extraction with HTTP basic auth because I use it in a third project I am developing with my wife, and it would be great to have it already packaged in a neat little gem so it can be consumed by that project and my new engine.

I finished the extraction and uploaded my new gem to RubyGems. I was surprised it got almost 1k downloads in the first 24 hours. I am guessing it was mostly bots or automations scanning for new gems.

I have now integrated the gem into my projects, and it is happily running in production. Next, I am creating the Rails engine and migrating both sites to it. Once I have both sites running smoothly on it, I will start tackling my backlog.

For now, I am happy that this little gem is out there in the wild, and that I have finally started this journey.