2nd
Woot, I'm a Rails contributor!
Me, a Rails contributor? SRSLY??
Early last month, I finally earned my bragging rights as a Rails contributor. It came totally as a surprise, I was not expecting my patches to be accepted anytime soon. Prior to this, I still had a 9-month old open patch on a bug with class name pluralization. I was expecting that maybe I can push for the patches to be accepted when they call for a final drive towards 2.0 some months down the road, but oh boy, bitsweat made my day by committing not one, but two patches on 1st June 2007. I even made a self-congratulatory post on Malaysia.rb to commemorate the event.
Rails Hackfest, the catalyst
About two weeks later, Working With Rails announced that they would start holding monthly Rails Hackfests. Out of curiosity, I decided to check my standing on the heels of my two humble patches being accepted. I was pumped when I found that I was in the top 10!
For the next two weeks, I was on a drive to contribute more patches to Rails. Sure, the prizes were great, but for me, it was the realization that getting patches into accepted into Rails core is an attainable goal afterall. What better way to say “Thanks for the awesome framework” than to do your little part to make it better for everyone else.
The thing is, I had not run into any genuine bugs since then, so I approached the Rails source code from many angles - test coverage with rcov, writing test cases for patches that need them and a bit of documentation update. All in all, it earned me a respectable third place behind Josh Peek and Pratik Naik who is doing good work improving has_many :through associations. To the sponsors, I’d like to request the Bungee Book, please. Thanks.
My patches tally so far
Accepted
- [PATCH] Allow non-numeric association group column when returning calculations result
- [PATCH] Record identification fails when rendering partial on association collection
- [PATCH] Increase test coverage of ActionMailer
- [PATCH] Utilize collection fixtures in tests
- [PATCH][DOCS] ActionWebService is no longer in the default framework, replace with ActiveResource
- [PATCH] Increase test coverage for ActiveSupport classes
- [PATCH] Reflection class_name should respect pluralization setting
- [PATCH] Make calculations respect :foreign_key option for grouped associations
- [PATCH] Rename calculate by grouped association to reflect actual intent
- [PATCH] Update the rake tasks to use ActiveResource instead of ActionWebService
- [PATCH] incorrect records return on find with has_many association, :group and :limit on mysql 5.0.37
Summary
It’s true what they say. You do get a nice warm, fuzzy feeling contributing to Rails. I would highly recommend it to anyone that has got some experience with Ruby. The barrier to entry is low - the Rails codebase looks like any old well-written Ruby code (suprise!). Err, except for maybe some hairy parts of ActiveRecord. I definitely had a good time and I’m certainly looking forward to more action. This time I’m bringing the Malaysia.rb guys! Oh by the way, a tip. If you can’t stand the suspense of waiting for 3PM MYT to come around (that’s when the Hackfest stats are updated), you can always use this report for a real-time view of the leaderboard.
