At Madriska, we are strong believers in the power of open-source software. Open-source software is software that is made freely available for use and modification. Through the use of open source, we are able to leverage the involvement of a community of developers for our clients’ applications. Many of our developers manage open-source projects or contribute to them regularly.

Madriska is involved in open source in several ways:

We contribute to the community.

Through the course of our work, we often come across bits of functionality that can be extracted and released as open source. When possible, we release this software on our Github page. Highlights include:

• Prawn, the premier PDF-generation library for Ruby. Two of the five core developers of Prawn are on Madriska’s team.

• uom, a Ruby library that helps represent physical units of measure and measurements.

• Crawdad, a nascent Ruby implementation of Knuth-Plass linebreaking (as seen in TeX).

• Pathfinder, software to find shortest paths and distances through 2-dimensional floorplans or maps.

• visilibity-ruby, Ruby bindings to the VisiLibity library for computing visibility in 2-dimensional maps.

• billable-rb, a command-line interface to the OS X software Billable.app.

Our developers and contractors also share code on Github on our personal pages: Brad, Greg, Jeremy, Jordan.

Our team includes two technical authors. Brad Ediger wrote Advanced Rails, about the Ruby on Rails web framework. Gregory Brown wrote Ruby Best Practices, a very well-received title for experienced Ruby developers. Both Brad and Greg have experience as technical communicators, including writing online articles, performing technical review of books, and teaching live trainings on the Ruby language.

We use open-source software.

Like practically every other company in our industry, we make extensive use of open-source software. The Linux operating system that runs our servers; the Ruby language and Ruby on Rails web framework that power most of our applications; literally hundreds of third-party libraries that we use in the course of our work—it’s hard to find a part of our stack that isn’t open source.