I don't make New Year's Resolutions. Rather, I try to develop good habits regardless of the date on the calendar. Recently I've started doing something new: trying to make at least one contribution to the world of open source, large or small, every single day.

Now I've decided to publish a few notes on these contributions. Why? Two reasons, really. First, it helps hold me accountable. Second, it might inspire someone else to make their own contributions. One of the big lessons, I think, is that it's not hard to do your part to make the open source world better. None of my contributions are at all earthshaking. But if we each move a pebble when it bothers us, eventually the whole mountain will be on the march.

Anyhow, enough philosophy. Here's what I did over the past week:

  • RubyGems Guides - Submitted a couple of changes to improve the formatting for the Command Reference page. This pull request hasn't been merged yet, so I'll have to follow up next week and see what I did wrong.
  • Rails Guides - Did a general editing pass on the Asset Pipeline guide. There's more work to be done in here: we need sections on caching and adding your own pre-processor. Feel free to get to that before I do.
  • What's New in Edge Rails #2 - Darned straight I count those posts as an open source contribution.
  • Rubygems - Added a tiny bit of command-line help for the gem owner command. 3 lines of code, but maybe it'll make a difference to someone.
  • larkistrano - Haven't done much here yet, but my intent is to bring over the stuff that I'm still using from rubaidhstrano into a gem that can be used with Rails 3+.