redemption in a blog

self.plug :with => ‘Rails Hackfest’

January 3, 2008

Yes, it’s a plug for myself and it’s shameless:

Whatever Zed Shaw may say about Rails its community, Rails has done a huge part in making web development fun again for jaded web developers (first-time web developers probably won’t be able to tell the difference), and more importantly, raising the profile of Ruby more than any other Ruby project/library/framework/tool ever did (and I’m sure we’re all constantly rolling our eyeballs at the new web frameworks that’re so terribly familiarly Rails-like). Hell, I bet at least 90% of Rubyists now wouldn’t even be Rubyists if they hadn’t come across the web framework that could 2 or 3 years ago. So yes I’d still be contributing to Rails so that it can make my life as a web developer easier, thank you.

I think I had about 18 accepted patches in December 2007 Rails Hackfest (a few of the patches were not attributed properly in the Hackfest due to technical issues with the Rails Hackfest site).

Probably the only significant patches were:

• Allowing a proc to be set for ActionController::Base.asset_host (changeset 8421).
• to_xml should not automatically pass :procs to associations included with :include (changeset 8258).

Of course Ruby 1.9 compatibility was a big deal in December 2007 since that Ruby 1.9 was targetted to be released on Christmas (changesets 8369, 8309, 8398, 8397, 8412). Yes, I know, Ruby 1.9 is a development release.

There were also broken tests to be fixed (changeset 8271), bugs to be fixed (fixing Array#to_sentence), and some refactoring (changesets 8343 and 8522).

And what would patching Rails be without random documentation fixes (changesets 8457, 8471, 8472, 8280, 8279, 8278, 8521). The API documentation always needs a hand, so if you see any outdated or incorrect documentation, or think you can improve them with better examples or whatever, just submit a patch (it’s easy and should take you all of 3 minutes).

This month’s hackfest has a terribly attractive top prize of a RailsConf ticket. Too bad I won’t be able to take part in this month’s hackfest since winners of past month’s hackfest are automatically excluded from the next’s. But maybe you can ;).

Posted by Chu Yeow at January 3, 2008 SGT | Permalink | | Category: Open Source, Personal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails