Feature Requests v. Pull Requests

Railsbridge has benefited tremendously from the input of the community that helps make each workshop happen. It's an easy thing to have an opinion about, because there are about a half billion moving parts and bits that could be tweaked and optimized. And who doesn't love optimization, amirite?!

One of the amazing things about the way that Railsbridge has grown is that a lot of the people involved haven't ever worked on an open source project before. And so they don't know the difference between a feature request and a pull request. We owe people an introduction and an explanation of what it means to Railsbridge to be open source and how that guides what we do.

For our purposes, a feature request is where you see an opportunity for improvement, and you make that suggestion in the form of letting other people know that a particular change would make Railsbridge better. This is awesome and Railbridge wouldn't improve without ideas. But where a feature request can be a great for a company making software, it's just the beginning in open source development.

When you realize that something would improve Railsbridge, it's up to you to figure out how to make it happen. If you don't have the necessary expertise, you should first figure out how you could get it. Having a project you're excited about it one of the most awesome ways to code (or learn how to do anything). When you're committed and learning, it won't be hard present your idea in such a compelling way to another Railsbridge volunteer that they want to help you with your goal.

Once you've figured out how your idea will fit in, make a pull request. If you're changing the Installfest or Curriculum, this would be a literal pull request on Github. If you're improving the way we communicate, or track data, or pretty much anything that's not code on Github, send it to the workshop volunteers listserve so we can see what you've made.

Thank you for helping and thank you for your ideas, your work, and your support!

TL;DR: RailsBridge organizers are always happy to brainstorm great ideas over beers or on the mailing list, but everything new happens because someone steps up to make it happen. It's an open source project, if you see something you'd like to be new or different, do it!

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