This document provides instructions for contributing to Ruby gems hosted on GitHub. It outlines steps such as forking the gem's repository, making changes on a new branch, running tests, and submitting a pull request with a descriptive message to the gem maintainer. If the pull request is accepted, the new version of the gem will be published for others to benefit from the contribution. The overall process emphasizes making improvements through the open source community rather than maintaining private forks.

1. Hacking on Gems
A GitHub-Oriented Workflow
Evgeny Rahman

2. About Me
• Developer
• Curious but lazy
• Hate getting stuck
t & g: evgenyrahman

3. Important Note

4. Using gems
• Somebody solved part of your problem
• Easy to get / easy to install
• Ruby community is great
• RubyGems.org

5. Bundler
• gem install bundler
• bundle init
• edit Gemfile
• bundle

6. OffYou Go

7. But Then

8. Possible Problems
• Gem is broken for your environment
• Bug in gem breaks your code
• Missing feature

9. Maybe
• Nothing is broken, but you’re nice
• Documentation
• Tests
• Security

10. What Now?
• The gem’s source is on GitHub (hooray!)
• You have a GitHub account (yay!)
• Fork the repo
• git clone <repo-url>

11. Do Work
• git checkout -b <new-branch>
• Add the fix/feature/docs
• Make sure to add tests
• Make sure all tests pass!
• Don’t bump version!
• Commit and push to forked repo

12. Pull Request
• Contact gem author/maintainer
• Create a pull request on the gem’s repo
• Point to <new-branch> on your repo
• Be descriptive in pull request
• Issue created automatically

13. Dreams Do Come True!
• Pull Request is accepted and merged
• New version of gem is published
• ???
• Profit! (Fame?)

14. What If?
• Host your forked gems
• Monkeypatch in application
• But it’s better to contribute

15. Thanks!
Questions?