A few months ago, Jack Grigg from New Zealand signed on to the #openhatch IRC channel asking how he could help. In mid-July, we sent him a chocolate cake.

He figured that since we were behind on adding projects’ bug trackers to our volunteer opportunity finder, he could make an impact by writing some bug import code. His contributions have made a world of a difference; now the volunteer opportunity finder showcases bugs from a hundred more projects. And within the project, Jack’s friendliness on IRC made the chat room more fun to be in.

So I knew I had to thank him. A few years ago, I sent chocolate by mail to contributors to the Students for Free Culture website. But since Jack was in New Zealand, I wasn’t sure how well that would work. Then I discovered sendachocolatecake.co.nz.

Sending a chocolate cake struck me as exactly the right answer. Off it went to his university; Jack immediately took it to a meeting of the cake society.

Because Jack took it upon himself to basically rewrite our bug tracker import code, he’s learned git, Django, and sharpened his Python skills. I’ve had a chance to mentor him. I’ve found that reviewing his changes as patch series helps me clarify to him what’s good and what could use work.

Thanks to Jack for sharing the photos under a friendly Creative Commons license. One more photo of, as Jack put it, “less cake.”

I don’t think we’ll manage to send cake to everyone who joins the project; besides, you have to keep the rewards random!

Seriously, any user of OpenHatch who has visited the opportunity finder in the past few months has seen the output of Jack’s code. Mega thanks to him! If you want to get involved with OpenHatch, do what Jack did: Get in touch with us! Our IRC channel is pretty active usually, but if no one says hi, do stick around.

(Thanks to Karen for reviewing this!)