More than 40 Drupal developers from Manila attended the first ever ContributeX on August 16, 2014 at Microsoft Philippines.
Drupal Pilipinas and X-Team partnered up with one vision and goal of giving rocket fuel to Drupal 8.
ContributeX is an idea from X-Labs, a fund dedicated to supporting open source communities. For its premiere to the world, ContributeX focused on the Drupal community, to encourage Drupal developers from around the world to contribute to Drupal 8 Core.
ContributeX is based around the idea that contributing to a community is not only limited to coding, but also to writing documentation, submitting bug reports, reviewing issues and even a simple “thank you” (or /five) for a code review can add fuel to any community.
ContributeX kicked off with a video message from Ryan Chartrand, CEO of X-Team:
The “X” in ContributeX represents the infinite ways that a developer can contribute to a community. We want this event to be a reminder to Drupal developers that contributing to Drupal 8 doesn’t have to be building a module — it can be as simple as supporting your colleagues, submitting bug reports, testing, documenting changes, giving someone a high-five, sharing Drupal 8′s progress with the world, and so many other ways.
Then followed by Gerald Villorente, where he introduced another X-Labs sponsored project, xEditor Distribution. He also talked about its features and why developers and bloggers should use it.
Paul de Paula took over and started the technical discussion, where he discussed how to create issues, create patches, how to review issues submitted by the community and more. Sidenote: drupalladder.org has some great guidelines on how to get started with this.
It was a great experience to those who attended and jumped right in to Drupal 8 core. For some developers, it was life changing.
To make things even more interesting, we also invited people in other communities to talk about topics like Angular JS. Ryan Angeles, a Python developer and soon to be Drupal apprentice, was generous enough to share his knowledge and demo AngularJS (which you can play with here).
So what was accomplished?
After hours of bug hunting on Drupal 8, participants submitted more than 40 tickets and patches on Drupal 8’s issue queue.
Here were the Top 5 Contributors:
The top five contributors will be HEROized, meaning each will be given a superhero illustration of themselves, and officially welcomed into X-Team’s “League of the Extraordinary.”
Contributing doesn’t require permission
It was both humorous as well as awesome to hear developers saying: “Can we continue working on bug hunting at home even though ContributeX is over?” And that is the whole point — to remind people that you are allowed to contribute.
Most development communities don’t make it easy to realize this, and most core contributions end up being from a small group of people (in comparison to the community’s size). ContributeX wants to change that for every development community — to enable people to feel empowered to give their communities rocket fuel and grow stronger.
I’d like to host a ContributeX…but this must be expensive
Here’s the best news: the total cost of the event was $140 for food (sponsored by X-Labs). Everything else, from the location to advertising, was donated or free to do.
It doesn’t take huge lumps of cash to contribute to a community. It takes a spark — a spark of passion that can light a fire for a community. We hope this does just that for you and your respective dev community.
We’ve only just begun
But a moment for a reality check: There are still 14,000+ open issues on Drupal 8. And 768 open for AngularJS. And 693 for node.js.
Dev communities only move forward when people contribute. Together, let’s make these communities the best they can be.
If you’d like to organize a ContributeX for your community, reach out to us. Also stay tuned for more ContributeX events coming soon.
