Monthly Archives: August 2013

One month to go…

One month and my OPW experience will finish. I was reading a blog post of Gabriela Salvador Thumé, an OPW intern involved in a Mozilla Crash Stats project named Socorro.

This week closed a cycle of 2 months in this amazing OPW experience. I am so glad to be part of an incredible team like Socorro. I was reflecting about our hopes and expectations, sometimes we feel that we don’t have to dream huge because the risk of the dream come true is little, but if we always dream at the lower limit, we never are going to experience the happiness of doing something that really challenges you. I know that doing challenging things all the time can be frustrating, but the gratification is so much higher than the fear of do not getting whatever you want.
I am digressing into this because I have just one month till the end of the OPW and I am enjoying so much that I don’t want it to end. But I am sure that because of this awesome experience I am rethinking a lot of thoughts that I have about myself, like my capability of doing what I really want (maybe sometimes I feel a little about getting into the impostor syndrome).

She was reflecting about this internship and I’ve started thinking about these two months that have passed; about all the expectations, feelings, experiences…
It seems to me to have lived two months of challenges, professional and personal challenges. It’s like when you go to a game shop and you see a shelf full of puzzles. You decide to buy a puzzle game because you like it, you feel that you can finish it and that it will fits good in your home.  Then, each day you look at the puzzle and you add a new piece.
The same way each day of this internship has been a new challenge, a new peace to add to complete the puzzle. Sometimes you find the pieces that perfectly match to the others and you feel like you are doing well but, there are days when you discover that a piece is not in the right place and you need to remove it and start working on it again.

This internship is spurring me on keep on working, it is spurring me on be confronted with others, to let the fears go away, not to be too much worried about mistakes that can always happen, and to hardly work to reach my goals and improve myself. You could sometimes feel like have chosen a puzzle too great for your abilities but maybe you should only need more time, or more studies, more efforts and I’m sure it will be ok…you’ll finish the puzzle!

Every new experience is a challenge, you’ll never feel like everything is clear at the beginning but the gratification at the end will be the reward!

 

[good first bug] FIXED

One of the projects I’m working on during my OPW internship is triaging mentored and good first bugs. [good first bug] is the tag used in the whiteboard in bugzilla.mozilla.org to signal that a bug could be a good first step to work on for newcomers to Mozilla. A [mentor=x] tag is also added in the whiteboard if that bug has a mentor assigned to it who can help developers working on it.

Triaging good first bugs and mentored bugs means running through those and making sure that they are current and still valid (Most of that bugs are a little stale but valid, other are not valid anymore). Another goal is unassigning inactive bugs and let them free for a new person to work on it. One of the bug days organized by Bugmasters is that of Mentored Bugs. Even if there is no active Bug Day it is possible to work on that in any moment. During this activity I’ve noticed this one bug 854952 and I’ve decided to try to work on it :).

  • I’ve started reading about how to contribute to the Mozilla codebase,
  • I’ve contacted the mentor assigned to that bug. I’ve spoken with him trying to understand the work to do.
  • The bug has been assigned to me and I’ve started to work!…my [good first bug]!.

After the bug has been assigned to me

  • I’ve downloaded the Firefox source code and built it.
  • I’ve started exploring the source code for understanding which part I needed to take under control;
  • I’ve implemented the changes needed. I’ve submitted my patch asking for needinfo before having a definitive patch to submit.

My patch has been approved and added to mozilla-central repository and it will be available in Firefox 25 even if it is still visible from the Nightly 26.0a1 (2013-08-06). It involves changes in the fullscreen permission prompt and the changes have been required css and XUL knowledge other than a minimal understanding of Mercurial and Javascript. I’ve worked on Mac OS but during the development process I’ve tested it on Windows, too. So I’ve learned how to build Firefox on other platform,too. (and with my Windows machine with only 4 GM RAM it’s not so quick 😉 )
This is the result of my work 🙂

Fullscreen Permission Prompt

Current Fullscreen Permission Prompt

While this was the previous prompt.

Previuous Fullscrren Permission Prompt

I’ve changed text and buttons’ order on UNIX systems, added a background image and halved the border-radius to make the prompt prettier 🙂 . I need to thanks my mentor Jared Wein and all the developers’ community, that can be reached on #introduction channel of irc.mozilla.org, if my good first bug has been RESOLVED FIXED in a short period of time and now I’ve learned a little bit more 🙂