I had newly learned javascript including NodeJs and Angular and decided to start contributing to open source, mostly because I was curious to see how actual large scale projects were implemented. After lots of searching around I found Taskcluster, which is a continuous intergration and deployment framework developed and maintained by Mozilla. They maintained a list of good first bugs that beginners like me could work on and were very welcoming.
I started with a minor typo before moving onto a couple of UI bugs. Looking back, these contributions might look tiny but they played a pivotal role in making me familiar with the Git workflow. This was the first time I was writing code that would be read by not just me but other developers around the world and it was these small contributions that would allow me to work on much bigger projects in the future. Moreover, I grew confident working in React as well as Javascript in general and I also started to understand the Taskcluster codebase.
Below are some PRs I managed to get merged during this time:-
Fix dashboard logo height in mobile view
https://github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster-web/pull/287
A ReactJS bug involving modifications to the site logo in mobile view.
Fix home page horizontal scroll
https://github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster-web/pull/300
A small bug involving horizontal scroll.
Retain search results on routing back to hooks
https://github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster-web/pull/397
Clicking away from the
hookspage reset the state the page was in so all search results were cleared on clicking browser’s back button. The PR was aimed to fix this bug. This was also the first bug which had me working on more than minor UI changes as I had to understand and modify the behaviour of the page as well.