Top all-time · #3736
J
Josh Matthews
Personal blog · joshmatthews.net/blogprogrammingsystems
Josh Matthews writes Dysfunctional Programming, a personal blog at joshmatthews.net about programming and systems. Since 2012, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Servo: Parallelizing the Browser”. The last post was in 2018, but the archive is still widely read.
33mentions?
21HN people?
2012–2019first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Josh Matthews' site mainly for Bugs Ahoy, a Bugzilla search tool that finds Mozilla bugs with mentor contacts, plus Servo talk slides and a Firefox contributor tutorial.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /bugsahoy/8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-10-10
- Servo: Parallelizing the Browser4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-02-10
- Creating a C API for a Rust library2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-18
What Hacker News says?
Following my curiosity, I found: The Story of Stylo: Replacing Firefox's CSS engine with Rust https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SSTRr2mFU Woo, 9M lines of C/C++ to 85K lines of Rust.. Author's slides: https://www.joshmatthews.net/rbr17/
Comment linking /rbr17/
on “Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web”Submitted Servo: Parallelizing the Browser as a story · 102 points
HN discussion"Bugs Ahoy" is a Bugzilla search page that lets you filter Firefox bugs that have mentor contact info by programming language and feature area: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “Code Firefox”Submitted Creating a C API for a Rust library as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe've got lists of recommended contributions for newcomers, and they come with a mentor attached as well: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “Code Firefox”Submitted Servo: Parallelizing the Browser (FOSDEM '14 talk) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf someone is interested in contributing and not sure where to start, here's a list of issues tagged as easy: https://github.com/servo/servo/labels/E-easy Not sure if it is still true but a few months back (6 maybe?), there was a post on HN about contributing to Servo where OP said that he found it easy to contribute despite the fact that he didn't have prior experience in rust. As this post mentions, the code base…
Comment linking /bugsahoy/?servo=1
on “Servo Continues Pushing Forward”Submitted Developing Firefox for Fun and Profit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'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/); - 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 lan…
Comment linking /bugsahoy/);
on “I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too”Submitted Understanding the Servo Strategy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe existing "Bugs Ahoy" site (created by the same person) has lots of choices: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/ ...but it gets you right to bugs, which may be a harder place to start for some contributors.
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “What can I do for Mozilla?”Submitted Understanding the Servo Strategy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOr contribute to Servo! Despite the huge milestone represented by Acid 2, it's still pretty early days and there is plenty of work to go around. The code's on GitHub [1], Josh Matthews did a nice talk about Fosdem that should give you a start on the architecture and how to contribute (video [2], slides [3]), and there is an irc channel (#servo on irc.mozilla.org) where you can ask questions. [1] https://github.com/m…
Comment linking /fosdemservo/
on “Servo passes Acid2”On a related note, Bugs Ahoy is a similar project for filtering issues in Mozilla projects: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/ there's 'Simple bugs' facet at the very bottom. E.g. simple and unassigned bugs http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/?unowned=1&simple=1
Comment linking /bugsahoy/?unowned=1&simple=1
on “Up for Grabs: Projects which have curated tasks for new contributors”For those having trouble seeing the slides in the video, you can find them here: http://www.joshmatthews.net/fosdemservo/
Comment linking /fosdemservo/
on “Servo Layout Engine: Parallelizing the Browser [video]”You are absolutely correct. The domain doesn't match the content right now, but I'm going to be running a sprint to fill it out with non-coding-related activities soon. You can see a prototype at http://www.joshmatthews.net/asknot/ ; I'm mainly lacking experts who can provide me with content and links.
Comment linking /asknot/
on “What can I do for Mozilla”"Bugs Ahoy" is another way to find ways to help. Bugs Ahoy is a Bugzilla search engine of "mentor bugs" with filters for programming languages and product areas that may interest you. http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/?unowned=1
Comment linking /bugsahoy/?unowned=1
on “What can I do for Mozilla”Mmm, pretty. I had a similar project a couple years ago attempting to replicate OpenMPT's interface in the web browser: https://github.com/jdm/domtracker and http://www.joshmatthews.net/domtracker/; it played sounds in earlier versions of FF and Chromium but I haven't upgraded it to keep abreast of newer WebAudio implementations.
Comment linking /domtracker/;
on “Chiptune”Josh Matthews has a neat choose-your-own-adventure tutorial for Firefox: http://www.joshmatthews.net/trainingmontage/
Comment linking /trainingmontage/
on “Contributing to Chromium: An Illustrated Guide”For people looking for a project, Mozilla has a lot of documentation and tools to help first-time contributors. "Contributing to the Mozilla Codebase" [1] documents how to get the code and build your own Firefox. "Bugs Ahoy" [2] is a Bugzilla search engine that filters "good first bugs" based on programming language and interests. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction [2] http://www.joshmatthews.…
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “On Being a Junior Developer”> not reordering virtual methods, not using STL types in > public APIs, not reusing enum values There's no reason to worry about any of these in Rust. The design of the language is intended to minimize and discourage footguns in general. > exception safety Exception safety is only a concern from within `unsafe` blocks. If you're using `unsafe` blocks at all, 1) really try not to, 2) if you still must use them, read…
Comment linking /blog/2015/10/creating-a-c-api-for-a-rust-library/
on “Good Practices for Writing Rust Libraries”You absolutely don't need C++ skills to contribute to Mozilla. They are of course required to contribute to gecko, but that's only one possible contribution option. Others are: * Firefox UI and devtools. Written in a combination of js, HTML and XUL, with some C++ in the backend. * Automation and tools. Mostly Python-based, this is the infrastructure used to test Firefox and related projects. * Servo. The next-genera…
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “Ask HN: What are some open source projects that a beginner can work on?”I strongly recommend taking a look to bugs ahoy maintained by some amazing people at the Mozilla Foundation. It's a great way to start contributing to a large codebase by solving some "easy" bugs. Check it out http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “Ask HN: What are some open source projects that a beginner can work on?”An easy way to get started is "Bugs Ahoy", a Bugzilla search engine that lets you search by programming language and feature area among bugs tagged as "good first bug" with a Mozilla mentor's contact info: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/?unowned=1
Comment linking /bugsahoy/?unowned=1
on “What I Love about Mozilla”Mozilla is always looking for new contributors. Think how much more productive you could be with such fast Firefox builds! ;) * Videos on how to download, build, and debug Firefox code: http://www.codefirefox.com/ * Good first bugs: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/?cpp=1&unowned=1
Comment linking /bugsahoy/?cpp=1&unowned=1
on “Go 1.3 Linker Overhaul”Holy crap, the background image for that presentation slides is 780KB and the background image for the page is 786KB http://www.joshmatthews.net/fosdemservo/themes/mozilla/image... http://www.joshmatthews.net/fosdemservo/themes/mozilla/image... Think of the mobile users!
Comment linking /fosdemservo/themes/mozilla/images/bg-sandstone-2.png
on “Servo: Parallelizing the Browser”Mozilla has https://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/ Feel free to contribute!
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “Show HN: OS – GitHub issues to help beginners make their first pull request”I have found the mozilla community to be very helpful and each project has a very good list of mentored bugs. The community has found http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/ to be a very good tool for beginning contributors to get the right first bug and step into the whole community. Best way to get involved remains to ping to #introduction on IRC (irc.mozilla.org) Regarding discovering them algorithmically tends to…
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors”Firefox is a huge project, but it is open to new contributors, has good documentation about contributing, and is written in many different programming languages. "Bugs Ahoy" is a search engine that will filter Bugzilla bugs marked "[good first bug]" by programming language or feature area: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/?unowned=1
Comment linking /bugsahoy/?unowned=1
on “7 open source projects to cut your teeth on (and the ones to avoid)”First of all, kudos to you for thinking about contributing to bigger projects, and open source ones at that! Projects with large codebases always take some time to figure out. Therefore, it's wise to start with a bug that a more experienced programmer has labeled "bitesize". Other commenters here mentioned Josh Matthews' super-cool "Bugs Ahoy" tool for Mozilla -- http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/ . I'll chime in…
Comment linking /bugsahoy/
on “Ask HN: How do I begin contributing?”
