Saying Goodbye to Singularity

I’m currently sitting in Pune, India. It’s my first day here. Yesterday ended about 35 hours of travel and layovers for me to get here. I should have been exhausted last night. Instead, I churned in my bed and was suddenly and unexpectedly wide awake at 2am with one thing on my mind: Singularity.

Scott Kellum’s first commit to Singularity was March 7th, 2012. My first, July 26, 2012. I didn’t know Scott very well when I jumped in to help with Singularity, but that soon changed. That’s to me one of the powers of Open Source; forging friendships from strangers over crazy ideas about code.

Singularity has been a pretty constant in my career since then. My very first conference talk, Responsive Web Design with Sass+Compass, was all about the power of Breakpoint of media queries and Sunglarity for actually designing responsively. Singularity was also the driving factor to get accepted to my first conference talk outside of the Drupal world. All through this time, working on it, and really its sister Breakpoint as well, has been the single thing that has done more to shape how I understand modern web design and development.

Singularity has been a home for me to experiment and grow; at 389 commits, 545,246 additions, and 538,031 deletions to the codebase, it wouldn’t be unfair to say I almost learned to code with Singularity. It’s where I cut my teeth on testing Sass, on making Sass available to PHP developers, to distributing Ruby gems, Bower package, and Eyeglass modules, all from one codebase. I played with architecture, module settings, dynamic APIs in Sass! Some of the things I wanted to do were so crazy I’m honestly surprised it worked at all! Singularity’s Responsive Grids by magic of Breakpoint? I’m looking at you. Those 1,083,277 lines changed in Singularity, more than just about anything else, are my growth as a developer.

I wrote the blog post introducing Singularity 1.0 4 years and 20 days ago. A lot has changed since then. First came Flexbox, then CSS Grid. As Scott put it in a Tweet to me this morning:

💫 @Snugug and I worked on a crazy new idea back in the day. With CSS grid layout those crazy ideas are regular CSS

Last night, sitting in my bed in Pune, after I had finished, it’s that realization that swept over me. With it, a wave of grief. It took me another another hour to update the README, and then, choking back tears, I issues Pull Request #238 - Feature/css grids. This morning, seeing Scott’s tweet and comment on that PR, and no longer able to hold my tears back, I merged #238 and released Singularity 1.8, thus ending further development on Singularity.

Thank you to everyone who has used Singularity. Thank you for your support. Thank you for joining us while we stumbled through these crazy ideas. It means the world to me.