Lessons learned from building Rain

Tackling a new project is the best way to learn about a bunch of new things and solve a lot of new problems. I’ve recently built Rain, a gem to generate beautiful API documentation from a Ruby comment syntax with markdown mixed in (check it out at https://github.com/martin-brennan/rain!). On the Rain project, I’ve learned a couple of things about gem development that I wanted to share because I think it might be helpful to others.

DocuSign connect XML schema

For those of you that have developed for the DocuSign E-Signature platform, you’ll have probably used their DocuSign Connect service to listen for document and recipient events so you don’t have to long-poll their servers, which they strongly discourage. The example XML in their DocuSign Connect Service Guide frustratingly does not have all of the possible values and fields that could come through with each request.

I decided to investigate this and came upon this StackOverflow Q&A that had a handy answer, which linked to the complete DocuSign Connect XML Schema as an XSD. You can find the XSD below:

DocuSign Connect XML Schema (XSD)

The SMS that started it all

Today I want to show you the SMS that started it all and began my career as a software developer.

One day in October 2010 my manager and I sat down to discuss a database solution for our company. We had unsuccessfully tried to use another company’s solution for our business needs but found them lacking, and we were already running an Access database for some of our data. At this time I had no experience with databases whatsoever, not even the basics such as tables, columns and primary keys. Jacob wanted to gauge my interest in learning about databasing and Visual Basic so we could develop our own solution. Needless to say I was very keen.