Didn't take it as harsh. I appreciate when people make me think about what I'm working on, so thanks. ;)
3 karma · joined June 16, 2010
An example from my experience: before I started working on Rubygems' testing infrastructure, I wanted to contribute to Rails, but didn't know where to start. The Lighthouse tracker is a bit intimidating without anyone to point you in the right direction. If there was a place I could go and find small "get your feet wet" tasks to then get to a point where I can rewrite major components, then I would have started contributing much earlier in my career. The way I got into doing things for Rubygems was via a friend: I got a direct request to help with a new project for Rubygems. I didn't know what needed to be done so I never helped out previously.
Githacking wants to be what that friend was for me: a way to contribute with no friction on either the maintainer's side or the contributer's side and a clear starting place for getting involved in a new project.
Taking that a step further: a major part of the platform will be feature requests from companies that depend on the project, not unlike the bounties large open source projects put out from time to time on a bug or feature. Companies request a feature from a project, it gets implemented, the contributer gets paid the bounty.
Hopefully we'll get the message across clearer the next time around, thanks for the notes. I'll keep them in mind when we get more attention in future.
It pulls data from repositories and issue trackers to make it easy to find projects with tasks you can do based on your preferences and confidence level.