Seeking new maintainer(s)

[cheerfulstoic]

As I am not actively working with Neo4j anymore and because I would like to have time for other projects, I'm not able to dedicate time to the Neo4j.rb gems (neo4j, neo4j-core, and neo4j-rake_tasks).

I have enjoyed the past 4.5 years helping to build these gems and the community around them. If somebody is interested I would ask them to contact me in Gitter (either in the support channel or in a DM).

On top of the issues / PRs currently outstanding in the GitHub repos, I have a personal list of things I've wanted to work on as well as a sense of some things that are more urgently requested by users of the gem. Off the top of my head these are:

• Support for SSL in the Bolt protocol (this is probably almost finished. I did some work to refactor the Bolt adaptor to support this in the neo4j-core gem and also included some performance improvements. I think it is largely working with one report of a strange issues)
• Support for id as an ActiveModel attribute in ActiveNode the neo4j gem (there could also be a larger refactoring of ActiveNode / ActiveRel attributes here)
• Refactoring the Query class in the neo4j-core gem to not re-order Cypher clauses on your behalf (this was inspired by ActiveRecord's arel gem before I had a better understanding that Cypher is not the same as SQL in this way)

I also can provide background of the gems which would be helpful in making sense of the code.

[jorroll]

@cheerfulstoic I think I speak for many, many people who have/are making use of this gem when I say THANK YOU for the ~~hundreds~~ thousands of volunteer hours you have donated to help us!!!

In the time I've used this gem / watched this repo, you've proven yourself to be tirelessly friendly and welcoming, and gone way beyond what I would ever expect in making yourself available to answer questions ASAP on Gitter and via issues. While I've never met you in real life, I'm confident in saying that you're an amazing and kind human being. I'm definitely very sad to hear of your transition, but it is 1000x earned! And congratulations on the new job 😄.

While I'm not prepared to offer myself up as a potential replacement, I will endeavor to increase my participation answering the occasional questions which pop up. If someone does feel they can step into the maintainer role, I can potentially help out. This might be a situation where multiple people can try and fill pieces of the work you were, largely single handedly, doing before.

[leviwilson]

We ❤️ you @cheerfulstoic

[cheerfulstoic]

Thanks very much for all of the kinds words ;)

Question answering on Gitter / GitHub would definitely be great, thanks!

Another thing that I just thought of that I should clarify: the minimum requirement (aside from answering questions) which I've been doing for a little while now is working through incoming PRs. I've been inspired by the C4 protocol on maintaining communities which basically says to do not much more than a sanity check on PRs and if somebody wants something different they can make their own PR. I don't think I don't that exactly and I usually give feedback on various changes that can be made, but I try to let the community drive when I can. Dealing with PRs also involves doing releases to rubygems. It's generally a lot easier for me to release every time there's a fix / feature. Bigger projects like Rails have a team and regular meetings where they can plan out collecting a number of features in a single version change, though when you're just maintaining something by yourself it's a lot less overhead to just release it immediately (and it has the side effect of making people happy ;) ). But I hope that the project can have more than just the one maintainer in the future.

[jorroll]

Just spotted this: https://neo4j.com/blog/this-week-in-neo4j-getting-started-with-neo4j-desktop-and-browser-graphileon-personal-edition-intuitive-detections-research-with-neo4j/#featured-community-member

👍

[cheerfulstoic]

:+1: Thanks for the heads up! Hopefully there will be some interest