Welcome to Cucumber community newsletter #6
  September 22, 2021

We hope you had a good summer (or winter, if that's more your hemisphere). This issue of the Cucumber community newsletter contains all the usual goodness, and then some.

  • State of the Cucumber
  • Matt Wynne talks you through your first Cucumber Open pull request in GitHub
  • Intelligent people saying intelligent things about open source and BDD
  • Fun and useful links (writing, art, electric tomatoes edition)
  • Back newsletter issues are online!

State of the Cucumber

New Cucumber School episodes klaxon! Ruby 6 and 7, JavaScript 7, and Java 7 are now available. (SpecFlow types need to wait a little longer for their episode 7, but we'll have that out as quick as we can.)

Cucumber School milestone! We now have 20,000 students enrolled. Would you like to become the 20,001st? (approx.) Head over to https://school.cucumber.io/ and sign up for free.

Release announcements: Vearutop released godog v0.12.0 and mpkorstanje released Cucumber‑JVM v7.0.0.

And because we're contractually obligated to include a blogpost by Seb Rose, here's his article in SD Times on How Transformation Works in Practice.


Matt Wynne talks you through your first Cucumber Open pull request in GitHub

At Cucumber, we want to encourage more people to contribute to open source. Some people hesitate because they don't feel they have enough experience, or simply have no idea where to start. We're all about inclusivity and encouragement and support, so BDD Advocate Matt Wynne is happy to help you join our community! He's running pair/mob sessions on Twitch for new contributors. So far this has led to two (2) pull requests, but more importantly, it allows people to learn how things work here at Cucumber Open, in a friendly and helpful environment.

To see for yourself how this works in practice, check out the YouTube playlist or come over to Twitch.

If you'd like to dip a toe in the water, or talk to Matt about anything (he's very fond of tea, and he lives in Canada now), head on over to the Cucumber Community Slack at cucumberbdd.slack.com and join the #new-contributors community. More confident folks can come to the committers' meeting on Thursday afternoon (UK time) - join the #committers community for the link. Everyone is welcome!


Intelligent people saying intelligent things about open source and BDD

If you want another perspective on contributing to open source, Ceora Ford provides a beginner-friendly guide to making your first contribution (video and transcript):
https://egghead.io/talks/git-how-to-make-your-first-open-source-contribution

Matt Wynne addresses how to tackle structural racism and sexism in open source:
https://cucumber.io/blog/open-source/tackling-structural-racism-(and-sexism)-in-open-so/

Séverine Darlot advises us on how to get the best out of our dev teams by using BDD:
https://devops.com/real-life-bdd-getting-the-best-out-of-dev-teams/


Fun and useful links (writing, art, electric tomatoes edition)

Since much of this issue consists of tech-related links, here are some non-techy ones for your entertainment and edification!


Back newsletter issues are online!

Even though the newsletter is only six issues old, it's evolved dramatically. If you want to check out where we've been - including interviews with several Cucumber users, a Japanese robot wolf that keeps you safe from bears, cats colonizing Cucumber-branded laptop tents, and Aslak Hellesøy holding his glasses while he gazes off into the middle distance - here you go:

Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3, Issue 4, and Issue 5!

If you have any suggestions for future newsletters, or a cute photo of your cat, pop on over to the Cucumber community Slack and let us know. Thanks for reading!