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Luigi Zaccagnini
Luigi Zaccagnini

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Contributing to a Google Open Source Project!

Intro

Hello everyone! This blog post will be going over the second week of Hacktoberfest and the process I went through to get my second PR going! This week was a lot more difficult than last weeks PR because finding an issue that I was interested in was difficult. Eventually I did find an issue that I was able to put a pull request for but it was a journey!

A New Issue

I was searching Github for an issue in Javascript that was assigned to no one. I was using this search option kindly provided by Andrew Nguyen to help find an issue that would be interesting:

is:open is:issue label:good-first-issue,"good first issue" language:typescript,javascript no:assignee

I encourage you to use it when looking for issues on Github! I ended up finding an issue from the playwright project by Microsoft and started looking for an issue. Eventually I found an issue that was a bug about the playwright trace viewer tool opening a new chromium tab if it is pressed. It seemed enough to challenge me so I tried to take it on! Setting up the project took a lot of time because I did not fully understand it and needed to take the time to learn how to use it and how to test with it. Whenever I had any troubles with setting it up or trying to solve the issue, I would always message the Slack for help. After getting the dev setup running I tried to run through the code to find where the trace viewer app would be triggered so I could see what was happening. I couldn’t fully understand what was going on so I messaged the Slack for some help with the issue and received comments from the community to help guide me into the right direction.


Max Schmitt
This probably related to Chromium. Either a bug or intentional behaviour on their end.

Yury Semikhatsky

recorderApp.ts
This is how we launch recorder window, perhaps we can add another flag to make new window not appear when clicking on the icon in dock


After receiving this information I went to go research some tags/flags that I could use prevent this bug from happening but could not find anything that would help. I ask Yury for some help after I couldn’t find anything but, I got no response. I was working on this issue for a few days and needed a breather because I was feeling really stuck. So I decided to solve this issue another time and pick up a new issue!

The Issues Strikes Back

Back to Github to find a new issue to solve for Hacktoberfest! I stumbled upon a issue during my Saturday morning that didn’t seem to crazy to fix! It was just removing an unused dependency from their code base. This process was new to me as I had to agree to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before my pull request would even be considered. Fixing the issue wasn’t very difficult as it was mostly combing through the codebase to remove all instances of the component.

Return of the Pull Request

Finally, once I was finished I issued my pull request, signed the google CLA and have been waiting for someone to review the pull request. It has been six days since I created the pull request so I was trying to find a community link (Discord, Slack, etc.) to communicate that I needed a review but could not find one.

Conclusion

Wow! This week has been crazy! I am hoping to solve that Playwright issue before the end of October but if I don’t, I do plan on eventually finishing the issue. I was glad I could find a new issue to continue the push for solving issues on Open Source projects. I have already started my issue for next week so I can’t wait to share it with you!

Playwright Issue
Site-kit-wp Issue
Site-kit-wp pull request

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