How to contribute to Rails?

I ran into a problem with ActiveRecord serialization. Apparently, it has trouble serializing hashes where ranges are keys. I found the Rails Lighthouse ticket (https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/3067-activerecord-cant-deserialize-hashes-with-range-keys). I've never contributed to an open-source project before, and this could very well take way more time and effort than is worth it for me at this point.

I'm just curious as to how one develops a fix and pushes the patch.

EDIT: I f开发者_开发技巧ound this link on the Lighthouse page: https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/sending-patches

However, I'd still appreciate any tips, advice, pitfalls to avoid etc. For a problem like the serialization, would a fix to the serialization library be better, or perhaps a modification of ActiveRecord/ActiveSupport?

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Here's all you'll need http://guides.rubyonrails.org/contributing_to_rails.html, there are some awesome people helping on irc.freenode.net (#rubyonrails, #railsbridge)

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and here we go with two simple screencasts!

http://railscasts.com/episodes?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=contributing