• Read more about 10 Tips For Open Source Citizens

This post is part of a series called Open Source Citizenry in which we discuss ways to eliminate the barriers that developers and companies face to fully participating in the open source community.

You might think there's not really anything to being a good user of open source. Install the library, use it how you need it, and move on. And honestly, for the most part that's a fine thing to do. But if you want to be more than one of the silent users, if you want to help the projects you use just by using them, there are lots of ways to do it. You could become a vital part of pushing forward your favorite open source projects without ever altering a single line of code.

Ultimately, being a good open source citizen is about respecting what open source is, how it's made, and how you can help. Open source software is made by many; that's its beauty and its curse. If you can help bring more order to the naturally chaotic development process by adding documentation, fielding support requests or even just encouraging maintainers to keep going, you are becoming a vital part of the open source ecosystem and helping it to grow.

• Read more about When You Absolutely Have To: Rails Development in Windows

Try as I might to avoid it, there comes the inevitable point in a project when I have to start doing browser compatibility. Plenty of people use VMWare Fusion or Parallels to run Windows and OS X side by side, but I find them both slow and unreliable when it comes to real testing scenarios, which leaves me with the necessity of creating a Windows development stack for Rails. After some considerable looking, I’ve settled on what I consider to be the “best” tools for the job – though they still fall short of the OS X equivalents.

• Ruby/Rails: I use the full recommended Ruby distribution as opposed to InstantRails or similar to provide maximum flexibility and customization. I also use the MySQL Community Server for the database portion of my development stack.
• Version Control: TortoiseSVN is a very easy to use SVN front-end, but my fingers have long since learned the console commands and continue to crave them, so I use the Apache 2.0 binaries for Windows to allow me to use SVN from the prompt.
• Console: An absolutely indispensable application for me is Console. This open-source app provides tabbed command prompts in a much prettier interface with a number of other incredibly useful features. I highly recommend it.
• Editor: This isn’t a slam dunk, but the closest thing to TextMate in Windows is, well, the app that was created to be TextMate for Windows. E Text Editor is very good (though in my opinion still too buggy to be called a 1.0) and comes the closest to approximating my Mac development environment. The heavier IDEs such as NetBeans and Aptana With RadRails are also viable options, but I like the speed and simplicity of E.
• Debugging: Since the reason I end up in Windows in the first place is usually IE compatibility, I need tools to approximate the incomparable FireBug. For markup inspection, the most-helpful-least-hurtful I’ve found is Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Javascript debugging, the most heinous of all tasks, is made much less painful by the Microsoft Script Debugger. Don’t let the “Windows NT 4.0 and later” fool you, this is the most useful thing I’ve managed to find to get some kind of control over IE Javascript debugging.

These aren’t by any means the only tools available, and your needs/mileage may vary, but after finally getting this stack together I can develop in Windows without going into fits of hyperventilation and frustration. If you have your own indispensable tools for Rails development in Windows, I’d love to hear about them!