Contribute Documentation to Ruby on Rails and Win!
Ryan Bates, creator of Railscasts - a free Rails screencast site, has created a great screencast about how to contribute code and documentation to Ruby on Rails, from actually checking out Rails, preparing the test environment, making your changes and building a patch, through to submitting the patch and basking in the glow of having contributed to the project.
Not only all that, but he's also launched a contest. All you have to do is submit a good Rails documentation patch to the Ruby on Rails development site and drop the link to an e-mail address provided for the contest, and on July 27, 2007 eight random winners will receive prizes (which include a Nintendo DS, Railcast t-shirts, Pragmatic Programmer books, a Peepcode subscription, and an iPod Shuffle). More details.
July 1, 2007 at 9:40 am
Typo:
20007 -> 2007 :)
July 1, 2007 at 9:12 pm
"July 27, 20007"
But anyways, how exciting! I'm going to go write my first documentation patch right now. Yay!
July 1, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Good call! Get ready for the prize draw in 18,000 years!
July 2, 2007 at 2:24 pm
oh PLEASE.
It is ruby on rails, you have to do a BROWSER BASED good service where people can accessibly and usably and easily go to work on the documentation! Something like what Launchpad did for translating software with that Rosetta software of theirs!
What you are doing is solving the problem almost the worst possible way!
July 2, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Mike: I totally agree with you. I think it's a bit arse about face myself, but as I haven't got the time to help fix the problem I can't complain, especially as it seems to work okay so far :) There is definitely significant room for improvement though. One of the most common complaints I see about Ruby and Rails is in the area of documentation.