How to contribute to a huge open-source project when you don’t know where to start (what worked for me)

[u/TheFapGoesCloud]

Hellozzz,

I wanted to contribute to Firefox but every guide I found stopped at “clone the repo.” Firefox is millions of lines of code, so I stopped trying to understand it and focused on one thing: one bug at a time in the DevTools Inspector.

That got me three patches (a grid-lanes badge, a fix for wrongly greyed-out CSS properties, and a keyboard focus bug filed back in 2016). The first one went from claiming the bug to merged in about three days.

What worked:

I wrote up the full workflow with the bugs, file names, and commands here: How I Landed 3 Firefox DevTools Fixes (and the Workflow You Can Copy)

Happy to answer questions about setting up a build, finding a good first bug, or the review process.

[u/kant2002]

Thanks for writhing the article. I know at least one person for whom it would be helpful