Scottish Ruby User Group

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in October will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The light is fading, the nights are cool to cold and autumn vegetables are bountiful. October in Edinburgh marks the start of big coats and warming meals, with the old festival of Samhuinn celebrating the traditional start of winter: fire and feasting.

So, how best to represent this in a Ruby sort of way? Well, the humans of Digital Ocean like to mark the month with the Bavarian inspired Hacktoberfest. From their website: Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software in partnership with Github. In short, a number of contributions will not only yield you gratitude from the project and the community, but it will also net you a sweet t-shirt.

The motivation here is to encourage people to contribute to open source over the course of the month. You can be entirely new to programming, or someone with years of experience, but the point is: the open source community values your input. Contributing can be anything from writing blog posts to building a whole new open source project. Here, Digital Ocean and Github are specifically tracking: writing documentation, raising bugs, working on fixes or working on new features for open source projects. Even with all the material available online, this can feel daunting to achieve by yourself. So, let’s work on it together!

We’ll start the evening with a brief introduction to open source, followed by a list of potential projects that would like your help. People who have contributed to open source before will be around to offer advice, and together we can work on getting your first contribution underway. Some of the projects looking for help may even be things you use regularly! All you’ll need to bring is a touch of enthusiasm, and either a laptop or the happiness to pair up with someone who has one.

To get yourself motivated have a look at: How to Contribute to Open Source. If you’re not a Ruby programmer but are interested anyway, come along! The open source community is bigger than any one technology.

See you on Thursday!