Introduce the project: I worked on Rails Girls Summer of Code site, which is a program that awards scholarships to woman to work on open source projects. The website is built on Jekyll, a static blogging gem that can be served on github pages.
What was it like jumping into that codebase? Per usual, jumping into the code base was a little frustrating. Having never used Jekyll the structure was a bit weird, and then tracking down where the issues we're pointing at took some digging around. Over all, though, this was a fairly straight forward setup. Download, bundle, and run Jekyll server.
What I did? I spent some time playing around with a styling issue, but abandoned that as I wasn't sure how it would be recieved. It also looked as if someone else was working on it, but that was unclear. I didn't want to start a conversation here as I figured my time could be spent elsewhere. At any rate, it was fun to dig around and try to find where the actual styles were held and then start to play around with that. What I ended up looking more into was updating dependencies. It only has a few, Jekyll and Github Pages being the biggest. I ran through several iterations of updating Ruby, then each gem seeing where dependencies would break and figuring out what combonation seemed solid. Once I had that I posted a question on the issue to get some clarification or even if the issue was really worth it. The problem seemed to come from someone who had difficulty bundling with the outdated version of Ruby that the site uses (been there...). I suggested at the least adding a bit about RVM in the readme to help prevent others from running into the same problem. Unfortunately I never got a responce in this time frame, but the maintainer did retag the issue as a bug. Hopefully down the road something will come of it and I can make a solid contribution here.