Mat's Blogging corner

For the next lab for my Open Source class, the goal is to create a repository with a simple open source library, let other students contribute to my library, while I got the chance to contribute to their repositories. The library is meant to get simple file information, such as file name, file size, and sha1/MD5 digest. I decided to write my library in JavaScript. I created four empty functions, raises 4 issues , and then waited for someone else to create a pull request against my code. Lately I was the one that would go into different Git project, look through all the issues to find the good first issue label. It was a nice change to create these issues myself, and then place labels on them. Eventually another student changed some of my code sent a pull request. I accepted it and merged his code together with him. I closed one of my issues, maybe someone else will come and help me out with the others. Now I had to contribute to another student's project. I knew the b...

This week I finally started working on one of my bugs. I decided to first start on the DevTools bug, since I got this one assigned to me first. Once I cloned the repo to my local machine, there were a few packages that I had to install first, mainly node and yarn. The README file was very easy to follow. A few weeks ago, I ran Firefox from source so I knew how to set it up. You can read up on my experience with that  here . I had to download and build the source once again, fortunately this time I knew how to do this. So I had the correct version of Firefox running, now it's time to look into the bug! The  bug  instructions are easy to understand, with easy to follow steps for reproduction. There is also a handy video for reference. Once I saw the "Learn More" button, I understood the problem. When the user hovers over the button, the entire row acts as a button, instead of just the image. Definitely not a software breaking bug. Nonetheless, I'm excited to star...

This week on my Open Source journey, I started hunting for my first bugs to work on. I was hoping to find something simple, so I could understand how the whole process works. Once I know how to contribute, I'll start looking into more difficult bugs. When looking for bugs, I was mostly looking for JavaScript or CSS bugs. There is a large variety of bugs available, from Python on the Mozilla Network site, to Java and C++ on Firefox Mobile Android. There was a few projects that I narrowed my search down to: Thimble , Firefox Dev Tools ,  Rust , and rr .  Each has plenty of bugs to start with. It's hard to understand what any of these bugs mean. Even after reading the description, I couldn't get a clear understanding on what I need to do. A lot of the bugs were also assigned to a contributor. So I kept looking for something that I felt comfortable with. On Firefox DevTools, I finally came across something I'd be interested in. The bug [1403883 ] is not very diffi...