Hacktober I

This is my first blog post in my Hacktober Series. Throughout the next 5 blog posts, I hope to explain my introductory work into contributing to Open Source Software.

What I Worked On

For my first Hacktober Pull Request, I decided to contribute to Mozilla's focus browser for iOS. This is a browser written in the Swift programming language with the intent of an increased anonymized browsing experience. I looked through the issues and found one that I thought was simple enough to do within a week yet would provide a challenge. Fixing the bug wasn't as easy as I thought it would be - the solution wasn't too straightforward - but with the help of the existing code as reference, I was able to find a solution.

I Think I'm Too Used To School Work

When working on a project at school, the instructions are laid out for you. You know which functions to work on, what they should do, and what they shouldn't do. Working on OSS was a completely different experience. School work is straightforward and because of that I'd be able to jump straight in and code. Being used to coding in this way made my first day trying to fix the bug very frustrating. After a day of trying to fix functions that looked as if they could be related to the bug without success, I decided to look at it again the next day.
This time, I decided to take my time. I removed all of my edits to the code and spent around an hour just reading the code and drawing out the dependencies. This finally allowed me to find a solution. In the future, I plan on spending a majority of my time reading the code, as opposed to my previous strategy of code first, read later.

My Pull Requests

• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios/pull/1416