
Code Firefox - robin_reala
http://codefirefox.com/
======
fhd2
I love contributing to Mozilla. I contributed to a bunch of projects in the
past years, including Chromium (a very friendly bunch BTW), but Mozilla makes
me feel like I'm a real part of this, not just some guy sending a patch.

\- Literally everything they do is in the open, volunteers can participate a
lot if they want to, even start new projects. (~50% of their employees remote,
I guess that helps a lot here.)

\- They're mentoring people new to a project really well - I love this even
though I prefer to just dive into the code myself.

\- They call you a "Mozillian", send you foundation/company/product updates,
invite you to Mozilla Summit (I was there this year, and it was amazing) etc.

\- Mozilla is not profit oriented, they just care about their mission: Moving
the web forward and keeping it open. Makes me feel like part of a good cause,
as opposed to unpaid labour.

All in all, they really got this figured out. I can recommend them to anyone
who wants to contribute to something big/important.

~~~
thesimpsons1022
do they have anything that an inexperienced person can contribute too? i'd
love to get involved but don't know if i am experienced enough.

~~~
WasimBhai
Jump in at #introductions at Mozilla channel on irc. There is always something
that you can contribute with, and you will learn too!

~~~
lastontheboat
It's actually #introduction (no plural), but yes, we are a friendly bunch!

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josteink
This is very welcoming sort of page. Good job!

Compare this to most open source projects of this scale, where you will have
people just tell you "to look it up in the wiki".

This wiki, if you're lucky enough to find it and find the right article, then
often only has a 50% chance of being up to date and therefore missing some
crucial information, causing you to spend days getting your build-setup
_still_ not working.

Before you even get to contributing, you're already meeting roadblocks on
roadblocks and a dismissive attitude to your offer for help.

This on the contrary, looks very inviting. Kudos to Mozilla :)

~~~
etfb
It really is. This gives me the warm fuzzies. If every free/open source
project were like this (ok, ok, like this _appears to be_ ) then we would be
rolling in riches. I can't count the number of times I've seen a bug in some
software and thought "I bet I could solve that!" And I probably could, because
I'm not a bad programmer. But the barrier to entry is like the north face of
the Eiger sometimes. This turns it into an on-ramp with friendly road signs
and a cafe halfway up that serves really good coffee. Bravo, Mozilla!

------
adrianb
It would help to have the steps described in text next to the videos as well.
Not only because some steps can be boring to watch for some people, but it
would also help to be able to copy-paste URLs and command line options and so
on.

~~~
Yoric
Everything should be here: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/introduction](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/introduction)

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oddshocks
"Setting up a Windows build environment"

... what? Why would they only support Windows? Why would they even suggest
Windows? Why at least not offer information on Linux, where I'm sure a large
percentage of folks are contributing from? It _is_ a FOSS project. You should
develop it with FOSS software, such as Linux.

~~~
icegreentea
Obviously there's a slip up with at least not including
placeholder/unavailable topics for Linux. That said...

Maybe the reason so many contributors to most FOSS projects are developing at
Linux is partly because so many FOSS projects are so goddamn hard to get into
from a Windows environment. I know that most Windows build instructions for
the projects that I've been interested in have been an absolute nightmare.
Wrangling standard make instructions into something that Visual Studio will
play nice with is a challenge that will turn off a lot of potential
contributors.

By explicitly helping Windows users to pitch in on Firefox development, they
are potentially capturing a set relatively untapped helpers. I feel that
contributions to a FOSS project should be judged on their individual merits,
not on the OS/environment it was developed in.

And because this it HN, I'm going to preempt any comments about 'how about
patches derived from slave (or slave-like) labor?' with, well obviously those
are bad, but in no way is developing Firefox (of all things) on Windows
unmoral in any way. I mean, if you'll happily let Window's users use your free
and open source software, then you have no reason to deny their contributions
because they use Windows.

~~~
bbondy
There are at least a couple dozen unavailable videos not yet posted. This is
not a slip up, but a work in progress. The site is very new and the outline is
not even fully posted yet. That being said, I just updated the outline with OS
X and Ubuntu planned videos.

------
bdg
Wow this is great work! When I was working on my first patch I actually looked
for video tutorials on this but came up short. The text tutorials are quite
extensive but you tend to miss a thing or two (in my case, I struggled with
the qnew feature of the SCM, forgot to tag the reviewer in the commit, and
even worked on some files I didn't need to).

I struggle a bit to find parts of the software I can work with, and I suspect
that's because I only have a 40 000ft view of the project, rather than a part-
by-part exploration of how things are connected. There's a lot of code in
there to read through. Unlike the MVC web applications I'm familiar with, I
don't understand where to put what code to change something, how to write a
test, or sometimes how to test things like crash conditions that should
trigger new exception handlers I put in.

This is an awesome start, but to get closer to the goal of a large number of
developers contributing meaningful work on the project there's more to be done
by the people who can explain the project in better detail. Perhaps this is an
opportunity for an online "learn to program" course?

------
WasimBhai
The people at Firefox are absolutely great help. Those of you who have time on
your hands, please do contribute to making an already awesome browser, even
better.

------
yeukhon
Former Mozilla intern here. I started contributing to the codebase since a few
weeks ago. There are good bugs to find and I can tell you from person
experience that contributing to large open source project like Firefox is
satisfying. Though contribution is no brainier: it's difficult because there
are things you can't understand. A lot of classes are not documented and you
literally have to read multiple files to just grasp 1% of what that class
does... hopefully we can do better on that part. But IRC is useful most of the
time (to get a quick answer), espeically #security, #mozwebqa and #extensions.
I am still waiting for review and landing my patch...

If you want to do some testing not direct firefox development, consider
#mozwebqa.

------
CalinBalauru
Would like to see a guide on setting up things in Linux also

~~~
bbondy
I'll be doing extra videos for Linux and OSX too, and eventually Firefox OS
too.

~~~
tehwalrus
Thanks, when trying to set up a build environment for FF on Mac OS X I nearly
gave up a couple of times! Videos would have really helped, rather than a
recursively complex set of wikis (Which was my recollection of what the docs
were like - may be wrong/out of date.)

------
ForHackernews
This is great, but why does everything have to be a video these days? Whatever
happened to just text + screenshots (if appropriate)

It's so much faster than a video.

~~~
mbrubeck
If you prefer text, you can use the official getting started guide here:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Introduction](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction)

------
k__
"I'm blessed with a loving wife and 3 amazing sons."

What's the deal with this? I've read it in many résumés...

~~~
vdaniuk
I guess that is an important part of his self-identification,a person is proud
of being a family man and wants to share it with the world. Alternatively this
may be a signal for recruiters that a person is not willing to do a lot of
overtime.

~~~
bbondy
Yep, this is my site and I'm just trying to give a glimpse into who I am. It
isn't related to the site but sometime it's nice to hear a tad bit about the
person you're listening to if you want to.

~~~
k__
Maybe I'm just not used to it. :D

It feels to me like these american show masters, who get on stage and greet
the people with a "hello, how are you doing" but since he's asking the whole
audience, no one answers.

~~~
vidarh
It took me _years_ to get used to people going "how are you doing?" and just
walking straight past me. To me, it seemed exceptionally rude - I'd stop, and
start answering the question, but the person had just walked on. It took a
while to realise that in some places it is just a greeting, and much longer to
not have to consciously remind myself about that...

~~~
nollidge
Yeah, English is full of weird idioms that don't mean what they mean.

------
frm1001xplrr
This is pretty awesome. Though I'll probably never code dekstop apps,
something like this for Addons would def. trigger a coding spur.

~~~
yeukhon
You'd be surprise a large portion is done in javascript in firefox and many
don't require deep browser knowledge like how the transport layer works or
working with the DOM. Some are style issues, some are correcting RFC specs. I
am fixing two extremely trivial minor CSP issues given I have read the spec
and done CSP related things.

Don't be discouraged.

------
voltagex_
Is there a way to "bump" bug reports responsibly? For example, the proposal
for persistent app-tabs
([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551849](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551849))
seems to have stalled and the original creator now works for Google.

~~~
piyush_soni
This is a relatively very new bug in Mozilla world it seems. :)

See this for example, a 12.5 years old Firefox bug.
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414)
Almost all major browsers suffered from this at a time, but the rest of them
fixed it. The only important update they've done so far about this bug is to
block unhappy users to even comment on it ;)

~~~
voltagex_
I am fully aware of the issues with Mozilla's bug tracker, that's why I asked
if there was a proper way.

For your bug, there's a proof of concept patch
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414#c657](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414#c657)

~~~
piyush_soni
Yeah, people have historically added patches, but all of them have been
rejected so far for one or the other reason. They are not even willing to add
an about:config workaround for that. Anyway, I'm sidetracking a lot from the
subject :).

------
serge2k
This is awesome, and I wish more projects would do it.

Unfortunately I can't work on firefox at this point, but this is still
awesome.

------
maccard
I'm an avid FF user, and also a (relatively) proficient programmer, with
skills in python c++ and a little javascript, but I'm terrified of getting
involved with something this size. I have no idea where to even begin trying
to help!

~~~
lastontheboat
We've got lists of recommended contributions for newcomers, and they come with
a mentor attached as well:
[http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/](http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/)

~~~
maccard
pulling the code right now!

------
pbiggar
Very nice. I wrote/maintained some of the predecessors to this while I was at
Mozilla
([https://wiki.mozilla.org/JavaScript:New_to_SpiderMonkey](https://wiki.mozilla.org/JavaScript:New_to_SpiderMonkey)
and [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Introduction](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction)),
and I love the video format.

Getting started with Firefox is pretty difficult, and its good that more folks
are putting effort into it. Good job!

------
iamleppert
+1 for whoever's idea this was. We need more guides like this that ask that
answer the basic questions on just dev process and work flows. Let's make it
easier for people to contribute!

------
J_Darnley
There are only two things I would ever like to contribute to Firefox: revert
changes to the UI made with 4 and after; use libavcodec for video and audio
decoding.

I'm sure both are way out of my league.

------
sandstrom
This is great!

I think switching to Github would increase the rate of contributions
significantly though.

