Scala Community Awards

UPDATE - Akka has weighed in on the award!

Recently, a lot of Scala projects have moved to github! This has drastically reduced the overhead of accepting community patches, and the community has been wonderful in making Scala and its documentation better. The number of contributions and the care in commits shows that Scala has one of the best open source communities around!

I plan to show statistics for the increase in community contributions for Scala, but I'm waiting a bit until we have some statistical relevance in contributions. Right now, it's still to early to 'prove' anything, but the numbers appear to be tracking (if you ignore the blip known as Paul Phillips before he was a Typesafe employee).

However, in the meantime, I'd like to start a quarterly tradition of recognizing those who have been invaluable in their contributions to Scala and are not members of either Typesafe, Inc. or students/teachers at EPFL. I'm calling this the "Josh Suereth thinks you're a swell contributor Award". Copyright pending.

The Scala Documentation Site

The documentation site is the brainchild of Heather Miller at EPFL. It simplifies the process of creating and updating Scala documentation for all of us. The source code is available here and all merged pull requests are updated immediately thanks to github pages.

This new site gained many contributors almost immediately, and the community has been wonderful in making sure that the documentation is high quality, relevant and up to date.

While there are MANY contributors here (Thanks so much to all of you), two names stand out as distinguished contributors:

• Daniel Sobral - For his continued vigilance in ensuring free documentation and translating his great Stack Overflow answers to the documentation format
• Santiago Basulto - For his translation of the tour of Scala into Spanish.

The Scala IDE

The Scala IDE has undergone a lot of clean up and stabilization efforts from my coworkers at typesafe recently. However, the community has contributed some outstanding features that I make use of all the time. In particular, two names stand out:

• Mirko Stocker - for his refactoring library and continued maintenance and improvements.
• Matt Russell - for scalariform and its integration into the Scala IDE.

Scala

Scala is one of the most difficult projects to contribute to in the Scala community. Due to its widespread user base, and complicated interaction of compiler features, patches must be rigorously tested, reviewed and revisited (although adding tests is usually easy). Even with a high bar, Scala receives many great contributions and has a good community around it. Since this is the first swell contributor award, I'm going to pull some old commits that I feel are significant.

• Todd Vierling - For his patch to drastically reduce the size of the collections library
• Rex Kerr - For his murmur hash implementation and performance considerations

Also special thanks to Seth Tissue for ensuring great Java-Scala interaction and Jason Zaugg, who offers a free code review service for all of us contributors and has a fair number of impressive patches. We have lots of users contributing testing fixes and patches, too many to name all of them here. I hope to recognize you each individually over the coming quarters, so if your name was not listed, it's not because we don't appreciate you! Everyone who has a closed pull request here deserves a beer! (Just ask me sometime and I'll provide).

Akka

I was just going to cover the core Scala projects themselves, but my coworkers have nominated their picks for the Akka project as well! With no further ado, the "Swell Contributor" awards go to:

• Derek Williams - For revamping Futures and Dataflow
• Martin Krasser - For the akka-camel module (with its amazing documentation).

Fin

Kudos to all those selected! I hope to one to be as awesome as you all, and keep up the good work. If anyone has any nominations, feel free to send me an email for next quarter. I'll try to choose around April (ScalaDays 2011 anyone?)

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