Hacktoberfest 04 — Strength in Numbers

I was exploring some other projects to contribute to and stumbled upon Jest, an open source Javascript testing tool developed by Facebook. I had been learning about Jest while working on another one of my PRs, and thought that it’d be interesting to learn more about it.

I was reading the readme for the project and noticed that the ‘Getting Started’ link wasn’t working. Normally, this link would direct new comers to the Issues page for the project, populating it with issues labelled ‘Good First Issue’.

However it was sending people to an issues page without any issues in it; which shouldn’t be possible since there were still bugs with the ‘Good First Issue’ tag available.

I figured something was up and decided to investigate. After some sleuthing I realized there was an error in the link itself; the ordering of the words in it were incorrect. This meant that users were searching for a label that didn’t exist whenever they clicked the ‘Getting Started’ link. Perhaps they changed the text of the label recently, causing the link in the readme to be wrong? At any rate I made my fix, created a pull request for it, and it was soon incorporated.

This exercise helped me realize one of the strengths of open source. Just as a casual observer, I was still able to contribute to the project by offering a fix I found at a glance. If this were any other type of project I wouldn’t have many options to help fix such an issue beyond maybe reporting it to the developers involved. By having the project open to the community at large, it seemed to be more robust and stronger, as more people were available to catch and fix any errors.