I am not an expert C++ developer, but I do know enough to do my day job as a MySQL Support Engineer, not only delving into the MySQL source code to fix issues but also looking at customer's API usage.
I originally wanted to write some patches that would benefit me with MySQL when dealing with large amounts of data, I would then have a rough idea of how far various client apps were progressing with a task.
Brian Aker first commented on one of my patches saying it would be ported to Drizzle, I was pretty flattered because I didn't think many others would find them useful. A few days later Monty Taylor contacted me to say the patch had been converted. I noticed a small bug in the patch so using my experience of Subversion I quickly learned Bazaar, created a branch and sorted the patch.
Soon after the Jay Pipes suggested improvements I could make to it, and within an hour I had made those changes too.
After playing a bit with Drizzle I got interested in the projects goals and how easy it was to contribute. I thought it could be a good way to develop my programming skills. So after a little bit of searching the Blueprints I found a task that would glide me in easily to Drizzle, I had a Skype conversation with to Jay about it and set to work.
That was all only around one month ago. In this short amount of time I have become one of the top 20 contributors, I have fixed several bugs and made several improvements. Some of these have been to do with fixing drizzledump (the drizzle port of mysqldump), thanks to the small changes I have made, this now works correctly.
I'm happy to be contributing to such a great project in my spare time, the organisation is efficient and the team are very friendly and helpful. Most importantly you don't have to be a C++ guru to contribute something, the guys are there to mentor any developer who wants to get involved. I urge anyone who wants to improve their development skills or to be involved in what could possibly be the next big thing to get involved with Drizzle!
