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I've been working with new contributors for some years now. Here are some advices: - find a mentor. It will helps a lot (use http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsah

I've been working with new contributors for some years now. Here are some advices: - find a mentor. It will helps a lot (use http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/); http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/); - for the first bugs, writing code is not usually the hard part. Understanding bugzilla and writing tests are; - ask for a commit access level 1 early to have access to the try servers (to run the tests); - finish what you start. Bug is fixed when it lands, not when a patch is attached; - mozilla hackers are nice people, ask questions on IRC. There's no stupid questions (we all started from zero too); Everything will get much easier after the first bug fix. And motivation grows a lot once you have finally landed some code :)

Osmose 12y ago
The mentor part is _huge_. Navigating the Mozilla world (Is that info in a wiki? Where are the docs for this? How do you know who to ask questions to?) is a learned skill, and at the beginning it's a big deal to have someone who, even if they don't know the answers to your questions, will know how to find the answers.
yeukhon 12y ago
In addition, come on #introduction and ask questions. People are ready to help there when they see a question. #developers will be another usual place to ask for help, but for beginner questions come to #introduction But on the weekend, be patient, the chance of getting an answer is pretty low but some people do volunteer on the weekend. Lastly, check out http://codefirefox.com/ http://codefirefox.com/ to get started. The best way to get started is to fix something you spot as bug.
dfabulich 12y ago
It would be helpful if the Mozilla Bugzilla had some way of opting in to identifying that you have a mentor, so that it would be easy for reviewers to see, "hey, this person's working pretty hard on this bug, but he hasn't declared a mentor. We should suggest that he find a mentor." I say this as a person who wasted two years working on a Firefox patch, which, in hindsight, would have landed in a month or two if I'd had a mentor. (Not that I'm bitter.) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347174 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347174
- jgraham 12y ago
  As of a few weeks ago, bugzilla has a "mentor" field which is being used to identify bugs that are good for new contributors to work on and the correct person to mentor them. It would certainly make sense for someone looking to work on a bug with no suggested mentor to ask for one. If you have any suggestions for how to make this work well in the UI, it would be good to hear; expecting people to notice "this bug doesn't have a mentor field so I should ask for one" seems rather unlikely to work. The bug that you worked on was a bit of an outlier in the sense that: * It modified relatively complex parts of the code. * There was initially no (HTML) spec for the feature. * There was initially insufficient information to know what the spec for the feature ought to say. So I think a mentor might well have told you "this is not a good first bug". Of course that make it all the more impressive that you pushed through the difficulties and got the patch landed and the spec fixed along the way. Thank you for that! The main delays seem to have been waiting for review, which a mentor may or may not have been able to help with depending on whether there were other less-busy qualified reviewers, and waiting for the patch to land, which these days we have a better process for and so which wouldn't happen again.
  - dfabulich 12y ago
    I asked around on IRC after the fact; it was generally agreed that I should have requested other reviewers rather than waiting months for feedback. If only I'd known! But that's kind of my point. "Mentored bugs" is an interesting approach, but normally people have mentors, not bugs, and I think that having a "mentor/mentee" field on user profiles may be the right approach for Mozilla; the field would show up on comments/patches I post. That way, the reviewer could have seen on my profile that I'm new to fixing Mozilla bugs and unmentored, and in his first review, he could have suggested, "I think you should fix these things, and BTW, I think you should find a mentor to shepherd you through this process."

Osmose 12y ago

The mentor part is _huge_. Navigating the Mozilla world (Is that info in a wiki? Where are the docs for this? How do you know who to ask questions to?) is a learned skill, and at the beginning it's a big deal to have someone who, even if they don't know the answers to your questions, will know how to find the answers.

yeukhon 12y ago

In addition, come on #introduction and ask questions. People are ready to help there when they see a question. #developers will be another usual place to ask for help, but for beginner questions come to #introduction But on the weekend, be patient, the chance of getting an answer is pretty low but some people do volunteer on the weekend. Lastly, check out http://codefirefox.com/ http://codefirefox.com/ to get started. The best way to get started is to fix something you spot as bug.

dfabulich 12y ago

It would be helpful if the Mozilla Bugzilla had some way of opting in to identifying that you have a mentor, so that it would be easy for reviewers to see, "hey, this person's working pretty hard on this bug, but he hasn't declared a mentor. We should suggest that he find a mentor." I say this as a person who wasted two years working on a Firefox patch, which, in hindsight, would have landed in a month or two if I'd had a mentor. (Not that I'm bitter.) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347174 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347174

jgraham 12y ago
As of a few weeks ago, bugzilla has a "mentor" field which is being used to identify bugs that are good for new contributors to work on and the correct person to mentor them. It would certainly make sense for someone looking to work on a bug with no suggested mentor to ask for one. If you have any suggestions for how to make this work well in the UI, it would be good to hear; expecting people to notice "this bug doesn't have a mentor field so I should ask for one" seems rather unlikely to work. The bug that you worked on was a bit of an outlier in the sense that: * It modified relatively complex parts of the code. * There was initially no (HTML) spec for the feature. * There was initially insufficient information to know what the spec for the feature ought to say. So I think a mentor might well have told you "this is not a good first bug". Of course that make it all the more impressive that you pushed through the difficulties and got the patch landed and the spec fixed along the way. Thank you for that! The main delays seem to have been waiting for review, which a mentor may or may not have been able to help with depending on whether there were other less-busy qualified reviewers, and waiting for the patch to land, which these days we have a better process for and so which wouldn't happen again.
- dfabulich 12y ago
  I asked around on IRC after the fact; it was generally agreed that I should have requested other reviewers rather than waiting months for feedback. If only I'd known! But that's kind of my point. "Mentored bugs" is an interesting approach, but normally people have mentors, not bugs, and I think that having a "mentor/mentee" field on user profiles may be the right approach for Mozilla; the field would show up on comments/patches I post. That way, the reviewer could have seen on my profile that I'm new to fixing Mozilla bugs and unmentored, and in his first review, he could have suggested, "I think you should fix these things, and BTW, I think you should find a mentor to shepherd you through this process."