Adventures in GSoC
This year I was accepted for Google Summer of Code and I worked on improving the infrastructure underpinning Firefox’s in-tree documentation mentored by Andrew Halberstadt.
This was done via enabling linters, faster build times, setting up redirect and well structured hierarchies, adding Mermaid package which allows describing graphs in a simple markup language and many more.
# Phase 1
First month was not with that much progress. Most of the time in June was spent in understanding the infrastructure and fixing sphinx warnings in `mach doc`and starting up with redirect bug.
For the people who do not know about mach , in word of my mentor Andrew:
| mach | is the Mozilla developer’s swiss army knife. It gathers all the important commands you’ll ever need to run, and puts them in one convenient place.
I also broke my laptop screen in June :P so it affected a lot of my work sadly.
# Phase 2
July went quite well and we made a lot of progress. I worked on adding RST Linter to catch problems in our documentation early. Initially we were planning on adding restructuredtext-lint but due to some problems we encountered in registering directives we later decided to add rstcheck to the project. Right now this linter is enabled on every directory in mozilla-central except 2 directories.
After this bug I worked on adding mermaid package to Firefox source docs which allows describing graphs in a simple markup language and some others bugs like deleting removed sphinx documentation from web server, improving | mach doc | performance and fixing some sphinx warnings.
# Phase 3
In August we rolled back again to start working again on redirect bug and landed it after making some changes.
We enabled RST Linter on few more directories, preserving the `firefox-source-docs` host name.
of my open source journey
I love open source and have been contributing to Mozilla since 2017 as I enjoy learning from awesome people while contributing my expertise back to the community.
It has been an awesome summer contributing to Mozilla Firefox Developer Tools. Although it is officially the end of Google Summer of Code 2019, it is not the end of my open source journey and I hope to bring more impactful open source contributions in the near future!
There will be a more detailed post about WebSocket Inspector in the upcoming release of Firefox 70 Beta, so stay tuned! Also, I’ll probably write a more elaborate post about my GSoC experience and the project if people are interested :)
Conclusions
I enjoyed working on this project this summer and hope to continue my involvement with the Mozilla. I have a gsoc repository that contains a list of all my GSoC issues. I want to extend a huge thanks to my mentor ahal and to Dustin for helping me work through issues when using AWS.
Cheers.
