Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

I am so excited, as this is the first major release that I've contributed to! Thank you so much to all the other people who've put this release together, I really do think this is the best Rails yet!

http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/releases/4-0-0/contribut...

I mentioned this below, but I'll mention it here, as well: if you have gems that aren't ready yet for Rails 4, please ping me and let me know if I can help get them ready somehow. If you maintain a gem and want help running your tests on Travis against multiple versions of Rails, I can help with that as well.

<3 <3 <3 <3

View on HN

Congratulations! That's truly awesome. Any tips for a novice developer who would love to start contributing?

Thank you! I started less than a year ago, and I was the #13th biggest contributor here, and received a commit bit a few weeks ago. It's not too hard to get involved if you'd like!

I wrote up my own personal 'contributing to Rails' guide here: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-07-05-how-can-i-cont...

The official one is here: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/contributing_to_ruby_on_ra...

The easiest way is to write documentation; that's how I got started. It's not for everyone, though. The simplest possible way to get involved with writing code is to pick an open bug on the tracker and fix it.

Like most things, it just gets easier the more you do it. The first one seems hard, everything seems confusing. But by the time you've done two or three, you wonder why you ever thought it was difficult.

LOL. Meeting of the minds with my comment above :)

Thanks! I'll definitely check out the guides and try to get started!

Great! Ping me if you have problems.

I gave it a shot! [0] Hopefully everything looks okay. The hardest part was finding an issue. Thanks again for your advice!

[0] https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/11193

I am sure Steve would say this as well (because he has said it many times). Start by improving the documentation of helping to regress bugs. These two items while seemingly inconsequential are actually a huge help to the core team and all developers who actually use rails (especially awesome documentation).

Once you get a certain level of familiarity with the way Rails is built, find a small bug and follow the contribution guidelines.

There is no magic :) Take small steps and continue to make any contribution you can. Ask a ton fo questions and work through issues, you'll get there.

Here's a blog post that Steve actually wrote about contributions:

http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-07-05-how-can-i-cont...

Congrats as well Steve! You should be really proud of this release with the rest of the core team.

Thank you! I'll be sure to try and start taking my first steps :)

I would love any documentation/article/lead to help running and supporting older rails versions. I've published a gem that supports both rails-4 and rails-3 (https://github.com/oelmekki/activerecord_any_of), but it supports only rails-3.2.13 for the 3.x part as it is my current installed version. I would rather support at least all 3.2.x branch.

And thank you for contributing in making rails awesome :)

Wow, 3 of the top 4 contributors are Brazilian. Glad to see so much love towards Rails from Brazil :) I hope to make it into the contributors list for the next release.

Yep, Platformatec are great people.

You're awesome. Just upgraded to the latest! Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com