One nice way to get in the mood of doing (and at the same time testing the system) is to start with trivial improvements. This is especially nice as a "starter" when you never contributed any change to Pharo. And by trivial I mean *really* mean trivial: -> a typo in a comment -> remove a temp not accessed -> clean out some trivial dead code -> do a simplistic refactoring of a bad smell, even inside a single method -> document something -> structure bad stuff better so it is easier to replace later Taken in itself, single changes like these have no influence, but: -> they get you in a mood of doing. -> they make you feel that Pharo is "owned" by you. -> take 1000 of those trivialities and they *do* make a difference. -> next time something bothers you, you will have the context of "I can just fix it". The critic tools is one way of finding these places, another is to just note down every time you see a triviality and later go through that list. The bug tracker can be source, too. Marcus
