From Heathen to Colore: A Document Pipeline Story

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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2026 retrospective
Colore is still alive at github.com/ifad/colore — Geremia Taglialatela took over after I drifted onto other things and pushed the project forward through Ruby 2.7, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, sidekiq 6, and modern CI. He sits at 354 commits — three times mine. The nginx C module Joe wrote in February 2015 is unchanged. Heathen the standalone service was eventually folded directly into Colore as a library; the original repo is archived but the code lives on inside lib/heathen/ of Colore. Same idea, fewer moving parts.

IFAD is a UN agency that runs on documents. Loan agreements, evaluation reports, country strategy notes, board decisions, project briefs — every web application we build sooner or later needs to take a Word file and give back a PDF, or take a scan and give back something searchable, or take an arbitrary blob and turn it into a thumbnail. Three years ago we decided to stop solving this problem one application at a time and put it behind a single service.

Today I’m merging v1.0.0 of Colore. It’s the second attempt at that service, and it’s the one we get to keep. This is the story of both attempts and the people who built them — because almost none of the code below is mine.

Nginx on Marcello Barnaba

From Heathen to Colore: A Document Pipeline Story