So, this month we had a Pittsburgh hackathon organized by facebook. I teamed up with Ruchir Patwa and made a simple web-app. It gets facebook status messages of one’s friends and predicts whether they are happy or sad by doing sentiment analysis. Here is the github repo of the project.

In the process, I made my first gem: sentimentalizer. It takes inspiration from a project by James Hughes.

This was supposed to be a learning experience for me on how to make gems. So here it is: One can start with the make your own gem guide by the rubygems. It gives a fast tour of a typical gem’s anatomy. After getting the basics right, one can start using jeweler. It makes building gems super easy. Warning: if you don’t do things right way with jeweler, your commit log will look like a war zone. It happened with me.