I participated in the May 15 & 16 Rails 3 Bugmash last weekend. This was my first Bugmash (if you don’t count getting Navvy up to speed with Rails 3 in the last one). I had lots of fun, resolved two tickets that applied to the Rails master and the 2-3-stable branch, reviewed some patches by others, got five commits into Rails, finished in second place, and got on the contributor list.
All Saturday (I couldn’t make it on Sunday), experienced Rails contributors and core team members were available for questions in the #railsbridge IRC channel. Everybody was very helpful and friendly, which made it a lot easier to dive in and debug in the Rails source.
Something that also made everything a little easier was rails_test_box. It uses VirtualBox and Vagrant to set up an isolated testing environment so you can run Rails’ tests without worrying about messing up your development environment.
It installs MySQL and PostgreSQL for you, together with RVM, so you can test on multiple databases and in multiple Rubies. And yes, it’ll even clone Rails in a shared directory, so you can develop on your Mac like you’re used to. Also, be sure to read Jeroen’s article on the Cookiestack blog.
I’ve learned a lot during the Bugmash and I highly recommend every Rails developer to give it a shot next time. Thanks RailsBridge, @josevalim, @spastorino, @rizwanreza, jeroenvandijk and everyone else who participated and helped out. You’re awesome.
Now what?
Like the Railsbridge post stated: this Bugmash was the “most effective yet”. That’s great, but we’re not done yet. If you’ve participated in the Bugmash, you know that the Bugmash tag in the Rails issue tracker still has over 100 unresolved tickets.
I suggest we keep going and spend some of our time to keep giving back, like fixing a small bug, writing some tests or reviewing a patch. Who’s with me?