The rubinius community is impressive. Really impressive. After watching Evan Phoenix's talk at MountainWest RubyConf, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Sure enough, it was just as easy to get involved as he claimed.
How easy? I went from downloading source code to having a patch committed in less than 24 hours. And this is the first open source project I've contributed to other than my own tiny gems on rubyforge. If I can do it, you definitely can.
Oh, and did I mention that having a single patch committed (no matter how small) gives you commit rights? Ingenious.
Why is this important? Because I am now very jazzed about rubinius. People on the irc channel are super helpful. The documentation on the lighthouse page is awesome. They're even on git. I don't want to sleep. I want to submit patches.
On top of being totally accessible for a first time OSS'er, the project is just cool. After toying around with lisp and io, self-implementing languages seem really neat to me. Coding ruby to create ruby is a gratifying experience.
If you've been waiting for a project to get involved in, you should definitely check it out. They have all the tools that make it easy and fun to get going fast. And best of all, they are nice people.
