What does it mean to support? An open source initiative 0.4
I originally set out to offer a lot more code contributions to the Brave browser for my efforts of the open source course I’m finishing right now. However, I learned the hard way, that this isn’t as easy to do as one would expect. It is indeed easy to get involved with a project, be a contributor, and support the initiative, but it is even more challenging to support the project in an integral way. This has been a humbling journey, where I’ve learned not to assume that my technical mind can do something, but instead — I need to put in the work, and the consistent set of development time to become better. Believe me, this is a hard thing to even admit to myself, because I know I have skills in areas that are unmatched at my level, but I know I have skills that could be a lot stronger in my development background. So you just have to keep moving forward, learn from the mistakes, the failures, and most importantly the critical criticism. Which at times can be tough, because people don’t mean to take an aim at you personally, but just that you aren’t delivering to the standard that is expected of you. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but like Neo — you have to just do it, and come to your own.
For this PR, I wanted to identify some contributions which aren’t in the form of code, but with documentation, and general project pm support. In doing so, I’ve helped clear up a few issues, or assisted in causing awareness towards the issue. This can be found to not only be supportive to the development community supporting the project or the issue, but a great way to immerse yourself within the community of the project.
First, I started off fairly basic (as always) to contribute on the validity of the issue.
Although the core team of the project got back to me with:
That clarification certainly helps, for developers who want to take the task on, but as well as my self who may choose to dabble further in this issue.
This next issue above alludes to a similar premise of the issue from before (pardon the thumbnail of the issue link). If you look closely at the thread within this issue, you’ll notice a cohesive debate and discussion around the use of Duck Duck Go within the brave browser, and making the defacto default search engine DDG. Which stems an interesting set of questions, why is google set as the default in the first place, one contributor mentions that this goes against the privacy focus Brave so heavily markets:
I personally don’t have a stance on this subject, but it’s interesting to see the range of opinions on this matter, and the dislike towards what many would deem as the status quo of search. The truth is already out there though, many engineers and now people know about the ever looming privacy issues with the likes of Google, Facebook, AirBnB and all the big San Fran giants. Mozilla, also slightly falls in this mix, but keeps an alleged imperative stance on user’s data, and the sharing of it. Nonetheless, I personally find it a bit fishy that they’re a near billion dollar revenue driven company (Mozilla), whom core service is the browser. Where’s all this money coming from, apparently from key ‘search deals’, they have with various ISPs, Search Engines, and much more.
The context of Mozilla and their revenue objectives does bring forth some curiosity towards how this model fits within Brave, as the captain of the ship is the esteemed Brendan Eicht after all.
Moving on from that side note, I kept moving through small tidbits I could support on, such as:
I offered some insight in their thread to draw the connect towards a commit done as it relates to this, but is slightly different:
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/pull/4097
Lets try investigating what they did, look more closely at their single commit:
Already implies not being too intensive of a problem, makes us get into debugging react components on the live! That’s cool, haven’t done that before — lets give it a shot:
First try at running the debugger, things can never be so straight forward:
Debugger listening on port 5858.
Warning: This is an experimental feature and could change at any time.
Crash reporting enabled
crash-herald.js:24
Unhandled promise rejection in the main process OpenError: IO error: lock /Users/arsalan.khalid/Library/Application Support/brave/ledger-rulesV2.leveldb/LOCK: Resource temporarily unavailable
index.js:45
I basically dropped this after finding the debugger to be a bit of a pain, I know it isn’t the greatest, but I need to keep moving — I think I’ve offered a small gland of support here.
I then closed off this release by looking at a few relevant triage issues:
at: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/(WIP)-Triage-of-issues
And this was the most interesting as it related to one of my other bugs and tests I’ve been looking at: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/12120
Seems like the above issue is only testable in master on Windows at the moment. I’ll wrap up here, hopefully this is mildly amusing :)
Thanks for tuning in, these were a bit of my musings through finding areas to mildly contribute towards the community and on-going tasks on the Brave browser project.
Cheers,
Arsalan
