After I got hooked on ES6 Promise (see my article on my company’s blog (FR)), I wanted to learn more about ES6/2015. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunities to explore it more in my day-to-day job. The only solution I could see was having a side project to hack on during my free time. But the thing is : I’m not able to do personal side projects. I usually tinker with ideas for a day or two, sketching stuff, making big plans, and ending never stick with it because of my laziness.
So this time, I wanted to find an open-source project to contribute to, and get some peer pressure/cheering to keep me motivated on the long run.
Fortunately, I discovered not so long ago that the Firefox Developer Tools (@FirefoxDevTools on twitter) were mostly based on frontend-technologies, and that it heavily uses new Javascript features as soon as they land in the browser. As a regular and proud user of Firefox since version 2, and heavy user of the DevTools, it sounds to me like a great project to contribute to.
I’ve been following Mozilla employees (or now former employees) on Twitter for ages. People like Tristant Nitot (@nitot), Christian Heilmann (@codepo8), Paul Rouget, Robin Hawkes (@robhawkes), and so many others forged my opinions in favor of the open-web and the values of the Mozilla Manifesto. I truly think Mozilla shaped the web platforms as we know it today and I really love the idea of contributing for a great non-profit foundation, which aim to make the web better for Internet users, and which have higher human goals than economic ones. Contributing to a tool that is used by thousands of people, helping make developers’ job easier would be a blast !
I remembered a tweet by Patrick Brosset (@patrickbrosset), saying that there were mentored bug on the platform. I picked an easy one using http://firefox-dev.tools/ , and start toying around.
In late 2015, I fixed my first bug ever for an open source project :
First @FirefoxDevTools fixed https://t.co/FX1Y6bdILZ Easy one but I thought the process of getting involved was much harder. Mores to come !
— Nicolas CHEVOBBE (@nicolaschevobbe) 11 Décembre 2015It felt great, I picked another bug, struggled a little while fixing it, and Patrick almost resolved it himself.
With Christmas and New-Year’s Eve holidays, I realized that there would be some times when I won’t be eager to work on the project, and I was afraid of not contributing so much due to my laziness. I need something to motivate me all year long.
So for 2016, I thought about a challenge, I will try to fix one bug each week. I know that some bugs should take more than a week to fix, between the discussions, the reviews, and you know, life. But I’ll try to start to work on a new bug each Monday of this year. There will be some times when I won’t have much time and then I’ll take easy bugs ( that’s not cheating right ? ). My family skiing holidays mid-January should be a good test for this.
I started working on a dashboard in order to show me how I keep up with this.
I’ll also try to write each Sunday how I fixed the bug of the week ( if I succeed it ), what I learned from it and how things went.
I don’t trust myself too much, but I’ll do my best to succeed this challenge and become a steady Mozilla contributor this year !