Last night at the Highgroove Studios office, we held the March edition of Hack Night, our monthly social coding gathering. We focused on starting, polishing, and/or discussing open source projects ranging from the super useful to the super silly (beer is always provided at our hack nights…)

While CBQ hacked away at some Rails documentation using docrails, others were busy building and even releasing other tools.

• Roughly an hour into hacking, Andy announced a new release of the zonebie gem, written by him and Patrick, which is a gem that runs Rails/ActiveSupport tests in a random timezone to spot pesky bugs.

• Steven and Andy, seeing the need for a lighter-weight delegator than what is found in Ruby’s standard library, hatched the idea for and released the first iteration of DumbDelegator.

• Will released Bootlace, a gem for bootstrapping Ruby applications.

• Jonathan released Yamldiff, a gem that prints out a list of missing keys for two yaml files.

We want to continue honing our own skills while bettering the development community through continual projects. Some of the results of our efforts are, we feel, pretty sweet.

All-in-all, we had a pretty productive open source hack night. We were super excited to have Jonathan, Greggory, and Ben (along with other Hack Night guests) join in the fun, set up some github accounts, and eat some pizza with us.

Are there any of our open source projects that you can fork and improve? What other projects should Highgroovers consider next? Jump in and get fork’n!