CocoaPods Bug Bash

With the announcement that Fabio will be working full time on CocoaPods (thanks SoundCloud!) for three months, we looked for ways to get the most bang for our buck on his time. In true Open Source style we looked at ways of getting people to help out cleaning out the GitHub issues.

We then looked for interesting incentives, and we have some compelling icing on the proverbial cake.

The Plan

We want to clean up our issues, remove duplicates, improve the writing and make them easily reproducible.

Fixing issues themselves would be lovely, but it's not the focus. This means you don't have to know a lot of ruby, but more apply general debugging skills to the problem.

How will it work?

On the last weekend of March, the 29th / 30th we will be in the CocoaPods IRC channel ( chat.freenode.net#cocoapods ) offering help to people. There will be an IRC bot that will assign people random CocoaPods GitHub issues when they request them, they then can triage it. We will then generate a leaderboard from the number of issues dealt with and give out some prizes at the end. This is a great opportunity to give back to the CocoaPods project and to say hi to the authors and other Objective-C developers in the chat room.

You mentioned prizes?

Well, we reached out to some of the great indie dev tool makers - tools I use everyday - asking if they would be kind enough to donate a license or two. We'll be able to give out licenses for the top contributors for the following apps:

  • AppCode - The alternative Objective-C IDE.
  • Bee - Mac issue tracker supporting GitHub Issues, FogBugz and JIRA.
  • Dash - Instantly access developer documentation.
  • GIFBrewery - The best tool for converting MP4 to .gif.
  • Reveal - The best way to explore the iOS view hierarchy.
  • RubyMotion - An awesome toolchain that lets you quickly develop and test iOS and OS X using Ruby.