As many of you must know, last weekend a Railsbridge Bugmash was celebrated, and I had the honor to be part of it for the first time. For those who are not aware about what this is, it’s a virtual event that takes place on irc.freenode.net at #railsbridge channel. The general idea of these events is to work on the Rails Core, taking a look at the Rails Issue Tracker. However, given that Rails 3 is about to see the light, this opportunity was intended to deeply test it looking for:
- Fix a known issue
- Report a bug
- Make sure your favorite gem or plugin still works. If not, fork it and make it so.
- Write a blog post about a certain component
- Write some documentation
- Get an app up and running and document what you had to do to upgrade.
- Create a screencast
Each accepted contribution or patch done by a participant, gives him chances to win one of several prizes, the more contributions the more chances you have to win. For further details check out the Railsbridge Bugmash Guide and the RailsBridge Wiki.
Many bugs were fixed during the event, some plugins and gems were tested, really interesting discussions took place (specially regarding generators and some other articles were made. To mention some:
- Making Generators for Rails 3 with Thor
- Getting Started with the Rails 3 Bugmash
- Getting Rails 3 (pre) up on OSX
- Rails 3 and Passenger
- Upgrading an Application to Rails 3 - Part 1
- Customizing your scaffold template become easier in Rails3
- Let your SQL Growl in Rails 3
- Rails Bugmash 2010
- migrating a rails app from 2.x to 3.0
- Notes from Rails 3 bugmash
- Notes from the field upgrading to Rails 3
And then Jose Valim, motivated by the posts done regarding rails 3 generators, published one himself called Discovering Rails 3 Generators
This was my first participation and it was a bloody great experience. During the event I was specially devoted to search bugs on Rails 3 and try to patch them. I managed myself to find 4 code bugs and 1 documentation bug, proposing a solution for all of them. One of them was not approved though, for there was a bigger problem that required José Valim’s intervention, the 3 other patches were approved.
I would also want to highlight the gigantic work done by the organizers, the core team members, and also to all the participants. I strongly valued the support José Valim, Pratik Naik and Michael Koziarski gave me. They were a hell of a help when trying to find solutions for the bugs. Would also want to thank Ryan Bigg for his cooperation, and specially to Sam Elliott, an incredible 18 year old guy with a great future ahead. Besides working together with Ryan and Sam, we kept a really nice chat during almost the entire bugmash. The awesome will to help at #railsbridge really overwhelmed me, where everybody was willing to help each other, something that makes it so much easier for the ones starting to contribute to Rails.
I would also want to congrat and thank all the participants for trying to make Rails better. So don’t hesitate to join the next time, it’s not as hard as I expected it to be and you would definitely not regret it. Now I’m really motivated to help others so I’m going to join to Rails Mentors on RailsBridge to give back the good things I received during this experience.