How to be an open source gardener (2014)

How would you exactly go about it?

1. Learn Ruby to a good level where you can understand (almost) any ruby code? if yes, is there any tutorial or book you recommend?

2. Learn Rails to understand all the different parts of it?

3. Or would you just go on and start reading the rails quick start guide, and then get immediately to reading all of the issues on github and start contributing to the docs first and work your way up from there?

Thanks :)

I have long had chats with Hubbers over the years about the privilege thing, and one of the hardest parts is the UI challenge. That is, you can do this, but can you do it in a way that's not maddeningly complex? It's unclear.

Eg a pure function just needs to track the function’s inputs and outputs; an impure function relying on class-globals has to track class state, an impure function on true-globals has to track full program state, an impure function modifying the filesystem has to keep track of fs state, etc.

And if you try to track more state than you need, then you end up with say 40 test cases for each permutation of config env variables that aren't actually relevant to the function in question, because users generating the test suite were on different machines/environments.

And if you santize the environment, ensuring its always the same, and specify exactly what should be tracked... you’re just back to handwritten tests