PossibleEmail Gem on GitHub PossibleEmail on RubyGems

This is a continuation of my projects relating to using the undocumented Rapportive API. My previous project, Find Anyone’s email: A Ruby script, was a popular project that spurred an issue on Github requesting the script to be written as a gem. After some work, here is the final product.

There were a few motivations in making this gem. When I first released the find-any-email script, I always thought of it as a proof-of-concept instead of the end all be all. Not only did it feel like a hack, but I thought about how easy and interesting it would be to integrate the functionality into a web app if the script was converted into a gem. Another motivation I had going into this project was to improve on my RSpec specification writing. I recently finished reading through the RSpec Book, and I wanted to practice writing specs for this project. If you actually take a look at the gem’s source code, then you might notice there are 75 tests for the gem. Those 75 tests were the result of going through TDD process of Red-Green-Refactor numerous times.

I’m interested to see how this gem would be used in other people’s projects. I was actually considering of creating a sort of SaaS product around the gem or an iPhone app. It seems that these types of email-mining things are of value to some people specifically sales and business people. I actually have something up that I built a few months ago, DirectContact, but I put it on the shelf at the moment. The ideas still seems to have value for people, so I might pick it back up after finishing another project. It gets a bit old thinking about a fairly simple idea after you’ve been thinking about it for awhile.

I would like to tip my hat to Jordan Wright for being a big inspiration for this gem after he wrote his python library Rapportive