Have you ever wanted to contribute back to Rails? This is the opportunity you’ve been looking for. We’re organizing a Rails 3.1 Hackfest on the weekend of July 23rd and 24th!!!

GOAL

The goal of this event is to have Rails 3.1 as the most stable version as possible. So, in this event we will focus on working on 3-1-stable branch of the project.

HOW

In order to achieve this we encourage you to:

• Upgrade your existing apps to Rails 3.1 and report any existing issue if it doesn’t already exist
• Test your favorite plugins/gems with Rails 3.1 and report any existing issue if it doesn’t already exist
• Review all the open issues and pull requests
  • Check if issues can be reproduced
  • If so provide as many details as possible (for example it’s important for us to know which Rails version/s are affected. They could be 2-3-stable, 3-0-stable, 3-1-stable or master)
  • If it’s not possible to reproduce the issue, add a comment on github issue tracker indicating that
• Provide test cases and patches for 3-1-stable blockers only (blockers will be tagged as ‘blocker’)
  • Follow the contributing to Ruby on Rails guide
  • Try to provide a failing test case (if you can’t figure out the whole solution)
  • Try to provide a full patch (tests, code and docs if needed)
• Write documentation (guides, API), you can push modifications directly to docrails
• Write blog posts about your experience using 3.1

Please note that since we are on the release candidate already, only patches for blocking issues will be accepted.

WHO

From the core team: Aaron Patterson (tenderlove), Xavier Noria (fxn) and Santiago Pastorino (spastorino), and the core contributors: Damien Mathieu (dmathieu), Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) and Josh Kalderimis (joshk) will be around, so don’t hesitate to ask whatever questions you may have.

WHEN

The weekend of July 23rd and 24th, 2011

WHERE

On IRC:

Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #rails-contrib

In real life:

What could be better than gathering together in real life and hacking (and drinking?) on the weekend!? It’s the best chance to get together and getting into the depth of Rails core. Contact your friends, your boss, your co-workers, and get them organized!

These are the places that have confirmed the gathering:

• Montevideo, Uruguay: WyeWorks
• Boston, MA: thoughtbot, inc
• Chicago, IL: Hashrocket
• Toronto, ON: Toronto Ruby Brigade
• Bangalore, India: CastleRock Research
• Boulder, CO: Boulder Ruby user group
• New York, NY: NYC on Rails
• New York, NY: Pivotal Labs
• Lehi, UT: Utah Ruby User Group
• San Francisco, CA: MochaLeaf, Inc.
• Portland, OR: SweetSpot Diabetes Care
• Dayton, OH: Littlelines
• Honolulu, HI: Aloha.rb
• Vineland, NJ: South Jersey Rails Group
• San Francisco, CA: Heroku
• Los Angeles, CA: Ruby/Rails Meetup Group
• Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil: RubyonRio
• Austin, TX: GameSalad
• Boulder, CO: Pivotal Labs
• Porto, Portugal: Geekslab
• Durham, NC: Relevance, Inc.
• Ottawa, ON: Shopify

Keep watching this list as it continues to grow. See you on 23rd!