A Review on the Rails 3 BugMash

The core team is producing tremendous amount of quality code for Ruby on Rails. It’s so great to see that we’ve some of the best Ruby geniuses working for Rails. Though in the midst of using Rails commercially everyday, we often underestimate or even forget the effort of these guys.

Last weekend, RailsBridge, a community of passionate Rails developers, hosted another BugMash event to help out Ruby on Rails in various ways. RailsBridge wanted participants to contribute to Ruby on Rails in any form, be it writing blog posts for an undocumented feature, reporting issues in the migration of a Rails 2 application to Rails 3, documentation, making plugins compatible or the traditional BugMash of clearing out tickets.

The BugMash over the weekend saw considerate participation, thanks to the likes of Peter Cooper promoting the event before. I saw people collaborating with each other to solve bugs and making libraries work with Rails 3. We all had a blast and were surprised to see so much impressive work and changes in Rails since last year. The BugMash web application, brilliantly handcrafted by Sam Elliot, received 50 submissions at the end.

I worked on 25 tickets and tested a couple of gems with Rails 3. I was able to submit patches for some of the bugs in Rails 3, out of which 3 patches made into Rails source code. It becomes especially easy to work on Rails source code during BugMash as the core team is around discussing issues in IRC. Other notable participation included a number of blog posts on generators and making gems compatible with Rails 3, such as factory_girl. The core team involved this weekend included José Valim, Pratik Naik and Michael Koziarski.

I thank RailsBridge for hosting this event. The efforts of Dan Pickett, Sam Elliot, Elad Meidar and Mike Gunderloy made this possible. I am looking forward to participate in the upcoming BugMashes and urge other Rails developers to do the same.

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