Blockchain in open source, A brave release 0.2
Hey open source world, back at you with another update of my open source developments on the ‘Brave Browser’ project. Which has been pretty interesting as of late, but can start getting tough with the growing responsibilities of a full time job. Especially after a promotion, you’re just stuck in a spot to perform even more than what you thought you were capable of doing! It’s like an endless cycle of hard work, determination, and distractions. But anyways, it’s still been pretty fun, spending time writing some code, contributing towards a project as big as Brave, and getting a school credit to top it off.
When working on projects as big as Brave, you know over 10,000 commits, hundreds of issues, projects underneath, several triage backlogs, and various frameworks at play, it can be pretty tough to immerse yourself within the community, the codebase, and finding issues which are a good starting point. Personally, I found myself interested with Brave payments, as mentioned in my previous article if you’re following along: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/projects/16
Within Payments lies a whole plethora of tasks and content, which is so hard to place yourself in, where do I start? Enter CSS, good ol’ CSS, I’ve despised you for so many years, but now you come to my favour. Who would have thought knowing how to mess around in fonts, colours, sizing, and much more magic within web styling would be so useful? This is of course completely sarcastic, UX and UI designers have one of the most difficult jobs in the business, if done right, it requires the ability to creatively put together a work of art within a web page, both useable and easy to understand for a user. Brave browser does this part very well, whilst even taking the various good parts about the UX from other browsers, but there is still one inherent fact. It’s still in its early days, and as such is adverse to various styling bugs, colour mismatches, theme inconsistency, sizing misalignments, and lots of additional bugs which open up as the codebase advances.
For my second round of pull requests, I looked at exactly this:
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/pull/13381
Pretty basic stuff, but if you notice a lot of things happened for this single PR. I got some steady conversation going with the developers on their Discord channel at:
https://community.brave.com/t/solved-brave-chat-program-with-rooms/4021, whilst one of their lead developers from the payments project team, nejczdovc, has really been active in responding to my messages, and was quick to help me even on a basic PR such as this.
In the underline issue this PR was for:
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/12770
You’ll notice the long thread, where Nej and the other developers were quick to respond to my queries, and even shared with me a beautifully sketchy archive.zip file, which is incidentally a fresh profile a developer needs to cut and paste the contents into their brave-development folder, which allows testers or devs to run a browser as if they’re a fresh user, seeing everything for the first time. This was especially necessary for this bug, as any person shouldn’t be seeing a promo for a million BAT giveaway ;) Even so, this profile bit is quite useful, but I noticed there wasn’t any documentation or code for quickly setting up this profile, so I opened one up at:
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/pull/13418, it still needs some work, but I’m finding my efforts are actually being taken seriously at Brave, and as such I need to be serious too.
I’m happy to find that my PR was merged into master just 2 weeks ago, which is awesome. I have quite a few other bugs on my plate right now, that I really need to get through, especially for this school thing. So I’m going to sign off here, thanks for tuning in, my hope that you gathered from this blog post, is that interacting with the community of a project is so important, both on their IRC, chat, slack, etc. and on their GitHub! It’s the key to successfully taking on bugs, and understanding the project as a whole, especially if you’re in the cryptocurrency game, and desire to invest in truly technologically provoking coins or products.
Arsa out.
