Ah, Portland. The open-source motherland. Pacific springtime beauty. RailsConf ’07 nirvana.rb # => true and home of CD Baby, a little record store that digs Ruby and Rails.

We’re gearing up for a RailsConf hackfest at the Jupiter hotel just down the street and figured, heck, let’s start now! The top twenty Rails contributors between the new year and conference registration opening day will have a free conf pass and a room at the Jupiter specially reserved, CD Baby’s treat.

No kidding. Registration opens in a matter of weeks. Sprint!

Rails contribution is measured by real Trac activity weighted in favor of well-tested, committed patches but also accounts for new tickets and even comments. We’re joining forces with Working With Rails to track Rails contributions from the new year onward. To be included, mark yourself as a core contributor and give your Trac username in your account profile.

Have a Rails itch you’ve longed to scratch? Now’s the time! Happy hacking, and see you at RailsConf.

Update: Derek @ CD Baby’s announcement with more details.

Update: I announced contest close on the opening day of registration but Derek announced an earlier deadline on January 22nd. Sorry for the confusion! To draw a reasonable compromise, the contest closes tonight, January 24th, at midnight PST. (That’s 2007-01-25 08:00:00 UTC.) After the contest closes, we’ll continue scoring the backlog of patches submitted before the deadline then announce the winners this weekend.

So far, 258 participants have opened 443 tickets, submitted 501 patches, and made 2976 changes. Congratulations! And the leaderboard’s still tight with 17 hours to go..

Update: the contest has closed. The winners are..