Well, almost 3 years. Green Ruby #1 was sent on feb 12th, 2013. Since then, we sent 156 editions, one per week without discontinuation, including a total of 5556 links. There is now 1691 subscribers to the newsletter. That’s quite something, for a mail that was just sent to some friends at the beginning.

During all this time, things didn’t change that much. In july 2013 the code was put on github and the process didn’t change much since then. I got a Rakefile to build the letter from yaml files and there is no need to change it. For the first 2 years Xenor was sending me some links by mail every weeks, then in 2015 Tysliu got back in and we used git to get both of their contributions. Later on, we got the slack channel where we throw between 10 to 30 links per weeks that I do my selection from. Nauman recently proved to be the most prolific contributor on slack. (btw if you want to join our slack group, it’s pretty open, just fire me an email).

We still don’t have any business project behind this publication. We are just a group of friends that like to keep in touch with the current trends, and that like to share the result of our weekly workout with our fellow coder brothers and sisters. Soon we will reach the limit of the free mailchimp usage (at 2000 subscribers), and that will be an interesting time. We will then ask people to unsubscribe if they don’t read the letter. Maybe registration will be closed if we reach the hard limit. But there is no plan to become a sustainable money-based adventure. So we’ll keep the cost to the minimum.

If you feel any gratefulness at all, pay it forward. Share your knowledge around you. Publish more open source code. Hug a friend or a stranger. Be nice and tolerant. Send some thank-you email to someone that published some open source code that saved your day. Love is wealth.