[BioRuby] A question for BioRuby newbies

[Pjotr Prins]

Hi All,

This mailing list counts 180 subscribed readers. Which is impressive.
Also since the introduction of http://biogems.info/ the number of
BioRuby downloads has increased rapidly.

You may also have noticed Ruby, in general, is making its mark in
bioinformatics. More and more people are programming in Ruby, which I
think rather delightful. And Biogems.info is proving to be cutting
edge, and accelerating development.

So here is a question to people who read the mailing list, but do not
necessarily participate. What is needed to pull you in? 

At this point I have two ideas to increase participation. 

(1) First a race. I would like all readers to vote a few times a year on
the most beautiful Biogem source code. We'll put up a few projects to
choose from, and the winner will be highlighted on
http://biogems.info/. Ruby is about beauty, and we are seeing
some of that in the biogems.

The other idea I got at FOSDEM this year from a convincing talk by Brian
Ostergard, titled 'You are doing it all wrong'

  http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/really_grow_community

where he made a strong case to address inexperienced developers. And
you know what, I believe he is right. So

(2) We will look for ways to get inexperienced developers involved.
One way is to define uncomplicated and moderately complicated tasks,
feature requests and bug fixes.

We are going to list these 'jobs' on http://biogems.info/. If anyone
picks up a task he/she will get very *strong* support from the plugin
owner, as well as the Biogem maintainers. You, the programmer,
will get all the credit for the work.

How does this sound? Does this appeal to you? Anyone of the less
experienced, or even experienced, wants to voice his or her opinion?
We may even turn some work into a Google Summer of Code project
proposal.

Pj.