Writing and programming, crafts worth honing

I’ve been doing quite a lot of writing lately, and quite a lot of thinking about writing, and a fair bit of reading too. This of course was one of my goals for 2015, and I’ve been keeping a consistent journal for the first time ever (fourteen days straight and counting). From all of this writing there is one thing I’ve come to realize and it’s that writing begets writing. The more you write, the better you become at clearly expressing your thoughts and ideas through writing and translating them from the jumble in your head to the written word. Your fingers fly across the keyboard with very little barrier between your mind and the keys.

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)