BugMash

Have you ever wondered how you could get started contributing to the core Rails code? Have you been watching the growth of RailsBridge and wondering where you could fit in? Well, wonder no longer: we have an answer to both of those questions. Announcing:

The First Rails and RailsBridge BugMash

The idea is simple: RailsBridge has a lot of energy. The Rails Lighthouse has a lot of open tickets. With the help of some Rails Core team members, we're going to see what we can do to cut down the number of open tickets, encourage more people to get involved with the Rails source, and have some fun.

1. Confirm that the bug can be reproduced
2. If it can't be reproduced, try to figure out what information would make it possible to be reproduced
3. If it can be reproduced, add the missing pieces: better repro instructions, a failing patch, and/or a patch that applies cleanly to the current Rails source
4. Bring promising tickets to the attention of the Core team

Some of the Bridgers will be organizing a face-to-face way for BugMash participants to come together (Teams), but there's no need to be there to be a part of it. We'll also have a room open on IRC, and people who are familiar with the Rails internals will be available to help point you in the right direction. We're going to do everything we can to make it easy to start contributing to Rails.

We'll be adding more details to this bare outline over the coming week, including a checklist of what you can do to get ready to work in the Rails source and details on a scoring system and rewards for the most active participants. For now, though, there are two things for you to do:

1. Reserve at least a chunk of that weekend to roll up your sleeves and work on the BugMash
2. Speak up if you can contribute prizes, familiarity with the Rails source, or other help to the project.

Official BugMash hours

Rails contributors are located all over the world, so we're going to define an extended weekend for the BugMash. So we're going to run from Saturday noon in New Zealand (00:00:00 September 26 GMT) to Sunday midnight on the US West coast (07:00:00 September 28 GMT). That should give everyone who wants to be involved plenty of time to participate.

Resources

• Pre-flight Checklist
• BugMashFlowchart
• BugMashCheatSheet
• Contributing to Rails
• Tickets tagged with 'bugmash'
• There are official Rails Continuous Integration servers which test against multiple interpreters and databases. See the Continuous Integration section in the BugMashFlowchart
• The Rails Continuous Integration Server Setup Notes can be helpful in getting the various databases configured
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/113-contributing-to-rails-with-git
• BugMashStats

http://railsbridge.org/
http://wiki.railsbridge.org/projects/railsbridge/wiki/BugMash