New Contributor

rubyonrails-core
#1

Hey guys,

I’m an NYC based rails developer, and I’m interested in getting into contributing to the Rails code base. Just diving right in can be a little bit scary, so if anyone is willing to give me some guidance on good first bugs to tackle or features they need help with, I’d be eternally grateful!

Best,

Lee

#2

Hi Lee,

I attended a good talk at RailsConf 2013 which inspired me to start contributing to Rails as well. It gives some good guidance on where to start and what to expect during the process.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEB6H8jAzIg

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/markmcspadden/railsconf-2013-your-first-rails-pull-request

As far as specific things to start working on, I’m sure others on here will be able to offer better guidance than I can.

Kyle

#3

Thanks for the slide deck, I hadn’t seen that before.

For bugs to fix and general issues I recommend http://www.codetriage.com/rails/rails (though I wrote the original version of it)

You could also start with documentation, find gaps in the methods already documented in Rails or in the Rails guides. Maybe find a bunch of methods documented in a file and find one with missing an example.

For finding things to fix I keep a pretty informal “pain journal” and whenever I do something in Ruby/Rails that was painful or not intuitive the first time I make a note of it. If I see others have the same pain, i’ll try to dig in and find a way to fix it or make it better. Working with beginner groups like Railsgirls helps find pain points fairly easily.

While technical in nature, this talk walks through a PR I made in Rails, how I broke down the problem and eventually submitted a PR video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd2oUU4qDnY slides:https://speakerdeck.com/schneems/dissecting-ruby-with-ruby.