One Year of Topaz
=================

**Posted: April 10, 2013**

It slipped by so quickly I didn't even notice at the time, but April 7th was
the one year anniversary of me working on Topaz. Or at least, of the
development work. In reality I'd spent weeks (maybe even months) studying Ruby,
learning its quirks, and reading MRI, Rubinius, and JRuby source code to
prepare myself.

A year went by very quickly; before long other contributors were helping out,
and we were starting to run more and more real Ruby code. Finally we were able
to start running useful benchmarks, and then (more importantly) to start
running `RubySpec`_, that was a big milestone.

Finally, in February, we open sourced Topaz, and the response from the
community has been incredible. So many of you have contributed pull requests,
filed bugs, and given your feedback on all aspects of Topaz. It's been amazing
to watch.

With your help we now pass (at the time of writing) 3874 examples, and 10356
expectations from RubySpec. And we're passing more every single day.

If you're interested, I'd like to encourage you to
:doc:`get involved </contributing>`, it's always a great time.

The last year has been amazing, but I look forward to the next year even more,
with your help we're going to make Topaz pass more specs and run more Ruby
code, faster.

Don't forget you can always download a `nightly build`_ and try Topaz out..

And if you're looking for some fun, grab a copy of `the repository`_ and run
``git log --reverse -p`` -- it's fascinating to watch Topaz come to life.

.. _`RubySpec`: http://rubyspec.org/
.. _`nightly build`: http://www.topazruby.com/builds/
.. _`the repository`: http://github.com/topazproject/topaz
