Contributing to Chromium: An Illustrated Guide | Hacker News Reader

Contributing to Chromium: An Illustrated Guide

meowni.ca

145 pointsDanielRibeiro14 comments

This is a pretty good guide to getting started on contributing to Chromium.

I was an external contributor for Chromium for 2 years and it took me a while to figure out some of the procedures and best practices, like building the Release build instead of Debug or changing my GYP defines to using SHARED_LIBRARY -- those tweaks will literally save double digit minutes even on machines with very beefy CPUs.

The only other thing I can think of that I would add to this guide would be to search for "Hotlist:GoodFirstBug" in the issue tracker when trying to get started. Not every bug there is actually easy for a first-timer on the project to tackle, but you can normally find something to dive into and try to fix, even without much knowledge of the codebase.

I overall had a great experience with the project and it really helped me grow as a stronger developer early in my career.

I dig this, it'd be cool to see a similar post for Firefox and other Browsers that are open source.

You might enjoy http://codefirefox.com/.

Mozilla has pretty good documentation for new contributors:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Code Firefox, a series of videos demonstrating how to download the code and build it (which, btw, takes less than ten minutes for a full clean build on my three-year-old MacBook Pro :)

http://codefirefox.org/

Bugs Ahoy!, a Bugzilla search engine for "good first bugs" with a mentor's contact information, filtered by programming language or feature area matching your interests:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/BugsAhoy

There are also friendly Mozilla developers on the #introduction IRC channel on Mozilla's IRC server ready to answer new contributors' questions.

Josh Matthews has a neat choose-your-own-adventure tutorial for Firefox: http://www.joshmatthews.net/trainingmontage/

Great article! thank you. Shame you do printfs though, it looks like you guys have done some pretty awesome work with putting GDB on steroids: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxDebugging#GDB

Anyone know what she's using to build her presentations? I poked around but couldn't figure it out.

More here: https://speakerdeck.com/notwaldorf

Plain old Keynote :)

Ah, thanks Monica. They're beautiful!

Hello, this is certainly off-topic but I am curious about your username. Is it in reference to Waldorf schools? My daughter just started preschool at one and I'm wondering if "notwaldorf" is a shot at Waldorf schools. As a parent I would obviously love to know about any negative experiences.

Debugging with printfs, using grep... Good old-school stuff.

I cannot believe that no-one has registered https://canihaveapony.com/

The links start getting on LSD when hovered upon. Found it funny :) But a good start point. Thanks for sharing.

first sentence:

"I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but ... my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were)."

Is she serious? Hardcore. That stuff will "make pure LSD seem like Ginger Beer..."

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