I submitted my first contribution, but I never got a response: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/8903 :(

I suppose it's a lot less of an issue now anyways, but in 3.2, using fetch with memcache with raw objects is super gross since you get totally incompatible responses depending on whether an item existed in cache or not.

Sorry about that. :/

I personally read every single issue, comment, and commit that goes into Rails. But often tickets come up that I don't know anything about, so I don't say anything. This suggestion is one of them; I'm not mega familiar with that part of the codebase.

Any pointers for getting started?

In my opinion the easy way is to look through the github issues and pull requests and understand what's going on. From there, try reading docs and seeing what does / doesn't make sense and editing it. You pretty much always get feedback if you send a decently put together pull request.

Look for places the code might not currently be clear, and try to improve clarity without changing behavior.

Once you've done that kind of thing, sky's the limit as far as I am concerned. I'm working on understanding and improving the parameter parsing behavior at the moment.

Is there any sort of prioritized TODO list, either by difficultly or importance? And that's not so I can knock out some big feature and be the hero, but so I can whittle away at some of the more nagging edge cases and make some random developers day when things just work.

I'd love for you to whittle away at nagging edge cases!

One of the most common places where that's true is in the ActiveRecord issues, which are about half of the open ones: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues?direction=asc&labe...

Even just making a little Rails app or script that re-produces the bug would be helpful. Writing a test case that's failing would be mega helpful. Fixing the bug would be incredibly helpful. :)

The issues page is the best you have for that, sort by popularity or something like that.

That's one of the only things I'm frustrated about - I wish there were a clearer list so that I didn't have to troll for tasks that need doing, or ask a core member on IRC/campfire

Every single issue is something that needs doing. We only keep bugs on the tracker, I'm pretty diligent about shutting them down.

We have a guide here: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/contributing_to_ruby_on_ra...

If there is anything I can do to make this more clear, please let me know. Documentation is something I enjoy.

Definitely check out Rails Dev Box(https://github.com/rails/rails-dev-box) too. It helps to create a virtual environment for testing and running the Rails test suite.

Once you have that installed, you basically don't have to worry about dependencies that you need to bootstrap the Rails test suite.

Upgrade an existing Rails app to 4.0.0.beta1, and fix the issues you come across.