TL;DR

Myron Marston is taking over leadership of the RSpec project, and will be the lead maintainer of the rspec-core, rspec-expectations, and rspec-mocks gems.

Andy Lindeman is taking over as lead maintainer of the rspec-rails gem.

Myron Marston is RSpec’s new project lead

Myron Marston has been contributing to RSpec since the ramp up to the 2.0 release in 2010, and joined the core team in early 2011. In addition to solid contributions to the code base, Myron has taken responsibility for many bug reports, feature requests, pull requests, etc. He also makes a habit of answering RSpec-related questions on Stack Overflow and Twitter, and he does this all with thoughtfulness, patience, and wisdom.

I can’t think of a better choice to lead the RSpec project, so I invited him to do so. Thankfully, SEOmoz, Myron’s employer, is allowing him to work on RSpec during work hours, and so he accepted.

In addition to the overall project lead, Myron will be the lead maintainer of the rspec-core, rspec-expectations, and rspec-mocks gems. While Myron uses these core rspec libs every day for his work, he doesn’t do much with Rails, so we discussed and agreed that we’d ask somebody else to take care of the rspec-rails gem. Enter Andy Lindeman.

Andy Lindeman is the new lead maintainer of rspec-rails

Andy Lindeman is the newest addition to the rspec core team. Like Myron, Andy takes great care in shepherding pull requests and answering questions in addition to making his own rock solid contributions. Andy also writes Rails apps and does Rails training at Big Nerd Ranch, which puts him in a great position to ensure that rspec-rails keeps up with changes in Rails remains a great choice for developing Rails apps.

Thanks in part to Big Nerd Ranch for their support of Andy’s work on RSpec, Andy has agreed to take the lead on rspec-rails.

As for me …

When Dave Astels introduced Steven Baker’s new RSpec library to me back in 2005, I started submitting patches, Steven gave me commit rights and, a year later, he decided to move on to other work and offered me leadership of the project. I was overjoyed to accept.

In those days, I was teaching TDD/Refactoring courses for Object Mentor. I was encouraged to work on OSS in my bench time, and I was particularly interested in tools that helped to promote the documentation and design aspects of TDD. RSpec and some of the early definitions/discussions of BDD (“it’s all behavior!”) fit perfectly into my thinking and my world.

After I left Object Mentor, RSpec was part of my day to day work on Ruby applications, but most of my work on its maintenance moved to my spare time. This was fine at first, as I had the support of employers and family, but I found myself doing less and less of pretty much everything else that I enjoy and learn from.

Back in June, I joined a project team at DRW Trading that deals in a lot of Clojure and almost no Ruby. In the roughly 6 months since, I’ve been learning a new domain, a new language, new programming models, and even a new text editor. I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate to be able to learn all of these new things, but I’ve found myself less and less able to balance my work on RSpec with my job and with everything else I want to do.

And so, it is time.

Of course, I’ll continue to contribute to the project and surrounding conversation, and I look forward to seeing all my friends in the community at assorted conferences in the coming year(s). I’ll just be arriving without my RSpec Lead hat on.

Thank you to Steven Baker for handing me the wheel, and thank you to everybody who has participated in the project and all RSpec users for your support over these 6+ years. It’s been a great honor and a great pleasure.