Webcompat, is one of the recent interests that I find myself occupied with. The community is wonderful and the whole idea of having a place where users can report problems is quite fantastic. I believe that this can evolve as something greater, since webcompat.com is not only a website that focusses on bug reporting and problems, since I believe that it is a common ecosystem where users, developers and site owners are notified with the issues on the web.
How did it all start ?
I am grateful to Dietrich for introducing me to this community which I find myself most related to, besides I always have this perception that if a volunteer or contributor is connected to the core idea of the community then he/she can relate to the project easily. So after getting a sense of what this community is all about I rushed to webcompat’s repo on github and started solving issues and submitting patches. The entire community of webcompat is very helpful and I know I shouldn’t specify names since all offered their support equally but I have to thank Mike Taylor for helping me submit correct patches and understand the idea of how stuff works with webcompat.
Where did you involve ?
I find myself occupied writing code, so I wanted to contribute to the codebase of webcompat. There is a repo named webcompat-reporter-extension which I contributed to the most. So the repo is all about browser extensions (firefox, chrome, opera, safari). The idea is basically to add a reporter extension to the browser so that reporting bugs, issues can be made easy. So I submitted four patches till now for the browser-extensions repo.
What made me contribute ?
It first started when web.whatsapp.com was launched and the firefox wasn’t supported to have that feature. It prompted me a message saying browser not supported. Then I got this feeling that what if there is a website that reported all such incidents; voila! webcompat.com. Now as soon as I saw the project in detail and understood what it is all about, I felt that this is not only a website that just gives all the bug reports of the websites that are broken, but it is a platform that is actually helping to establish the thought of having websites work across the web. Be it any device, browser etc fundamentally all operate over the web, there is no point if they don’t work across everywhere. So this broader thought acted as a catalyst in helping me to contribute to this project.
Interested ? Want to contribute ?
Before you rush, If you feel the same as webcompat.com/about then please go ahead start contributing in which ever way you can. There are various ways to contribute, choose where you’d want to. The community can be reached out on irc.mozilla.org under the channel #webcompat It has been wonderful being part of this community and I look forward to contribute more in every possible way I can.
Thats it folks, Happy Hacking !!