This weekend we Big Nerd Ranch (a.k.a. Taconauts) took some time to do one of the things we really love: create and release Open Source Software. In fact, we released not one, but three new tools into the world: grocer, git_tracker, and puppet-osx_defaults.

Announcing: grocer

Grocer interfaces with the Apple Push Notification Service to send push notifications to iOS devices and collect notification feedback via the Feedback Service. There are other gems out there to do this, but Grocer plans to be the cleanest, most extensible, and friendliest.

Andy, Patrick, and I built the grocer in the course of just two days. Andy and I started it with a morning-long ping pong-pairing session on Thursday, the three of us hacked on it through the afternoon and most of Friday, and pushed it out Friday night.

Announcing: git_tracker

Some simple tricks that make working with Pivotal Tracker even better… and easier… um, besier!

I technically pushed the first version (0.0.1) of git_tracker a week ago, but it went v1.0 Saturday afternoon. Please give it a shot, and feel free to open issues and send pull-requests.

Announcing: puppet-osx_defaults

This is a simple puppet module for managing the defaults system in OS X. It currently has support for defaults domain keys whose values are boolean, integer, or string types.

Will, a lover of all things automated, whipped together a Puppet script for sane OS X defaults.

Image credit: http://timmyclunkers.tumblr.com/