Project Ideas
Ruby 1.9 Field Medic.
Start with Ruport and tumble through dependencies, working on compatibility issues. From there, work on helping with 1.9 support where needed in projects like: ActiveRecord, mechanize, redcloth, Camping, Merb, hpricot, highline, and maybe others. I've not checked the 1.9 status of these projects, but I'm sure could come up with many more if time permitted.
A Six Month Nightmare with RubyForge.
See all those bug reports?
See all those feature requests?
No one likes PHP. But RubyForge is driving me insane. I would be willing to fix it given the time and funding.
Uncovering Hidden Gems
I could request suggestions for various useful but under-documented or less well known Ruby libraries, either third party or stdlib, and write a large series of tutorials and quick references. The idea here is that it would hopefully result in a large amount of documentation being written, which would spark contributions to these many 'hidden gems' in Ruby.
First class PDF support in Ruby.
I'm currently maintaining PDF::Writer along with Mike Milner. The library implements most of the PDF spec, and is incredibly useful. However, it's not very usable. It is slow, has API issues, and countless bugs. The current plan is to maintain the library making minor improvements when we can. A large time block would allow for something better: A fast, thin, pretty rewrite. This would go a long way to helping Ruby be a first choice for reporting software development.
From Lone Hacker to Community Leader.
I could work with newer or shy developers to help them get acquainted with free software practices in general. I'd help people learn how to package gems, set up mailing lists, do sane release cycles, etc. I could maybe even produce a free book called "Open Source Software Development in Ruby"
Documentation Project Ideas
I could also work on miscellaneous documentation projects if I get enough of them lined up:
- Matt Todd suggests creating a guide for starting and managing Ruby Library projects.