Friday, February 24, 2012

Meet us at PyCon!


First, a resounding "thanks" to our open sorcerers!

In the open source world, reddit is a bit unique. Our code is out there for anyone to use, yet the biggest benefit most contributors get isn't running their own copy for themselves, but seeing their changes live on reddit.com. We know the reddit code isn't well documented or easy to traverse, and that makes it all the more amazing for us to see the number of fantastic pull requests coming in every month — by commit count, roughly 6.6% of reddit code is from open source contributors (and that's not counting the 21 open pull requests that we're behind on reviewing).

Special thanks to bboe and buddydvd for their work on the API layer! And a big "white hat" thanks to rolmos for responsibly disclosing a banned subreddit permissions issue.

To PyCon!

But where would reddit be without Python? I'm pleased to announce that reddit will be hosting a sprint at PyCon 2012. We'd be remiss to forget that reddit is about more than just the server side code. There's a budding community of applications, scripts, and friendly bots taking advantage of the reddit API, and we'd love to see more of that.

How do PyCon sprints work? They're basically hack-a-thons with perhaps a bit more direction than usual. Sprints are about tackling one or more specific problems in a project. The reddit API, like the reddit code, could use a bit of work, so that's part of the focus of the sprint. But since that may not be interesting to everyone, we'd also like to welcome anyone wanting to work on an API client to participate in the sprint.

During the sprint, chromakode, spladug and I will be on hand to answer questions about the code, API, and almost anything else you'd like to discuss. For more information and to officially sign up, see the PyCon sprints page. If you don't have time for our sprint (or won't be around for them), keep an eye out for reddit-shirted-admins at PyCon itself — we'll be around for the main conference events, as well.

PyCon sprints run from Monday, March 12th through Thursday, March 15th (oh, and PyCon's in Santa Clara, CA this year). They're free-form by nature with no strict schedule; expect us to be available from around 10 AM to around dinner-time. Be sure to come by for the pre-sprint intro sessions on Sunday evening if you're planning on joining us!

Monday, February 13, 2012

A cause worthy of rallying! Let’s get reading! Let’s get kids reading!

Last year we had our first annual book exchange on redditgifts. It was a ton of fun and a big success with almost 5,000 participants in 58 countries sending books to each other. This year we are doing it again, but with a bit more purpose. It's no secret that when reddit gets behind an idea that it can accomplish just about anything - and so we ask you, kind redditors from across the globe: help us show the world that reading is both essential and awesome, and that the reddit community shan’t let it die! How exactly are we going to do this? Let's discuss.

We’ve partnered with DonorsChoose.org to put together a donation drive focused on getting books that redditors love into the hands of students eager to read them. We’ve also broken down the teachers’ requests into a few subreddit genres, in case a little friendly competition interests you. Visit DonorsChoose.org/redditgifts to choose a subreddit-specific project to support, or to give to any book-related project you want.

But you don't have to take *my* word for it.

Listen to Ken Jennings and his adorable daughter...



In the past couple weeks we’ve talked to a lot of authors who are excited to join the exchange this year. Some of them you'll even be excited about! In addition to participating in the exchange, we hope to convince them to do AMAs too. More to come on that in coming days.

Lastly, here's the link to sign up for the book exchange. Each participant in the book exchange will get a special code to instantly DOUBLE their next donation to DonorsChoose.org! That’s like free money. Free money to help kids get books. Awesome.

We also have a T-Shirt exchange and Yarn exchange going on, if you’re into those kind of things.