DEV Community

Amir Mullagaliev
Amir Mullagaliev

Posted on • Edited on

Hard Times

Introduction

My second contribution wasn't successful as I decided to pick really huge project with a complex tasks. At first they seam pretty simple, but once you start setting up environment for contribution you start to understand that it will take a while. To be precise, it took me approximately seven long hours just to set up everything.

JabRef

Second contribution was made on German project called JabRef it is an application written mostly in JavaFx aimed at managing BibTeX and biblatex (.bib) databases. It is really huge project that contains thousands lines of code, it wasn't easy to understand what is going on there at first. I have found issue that fit me.

The purpose of this issue is to make a focus to the chosen field.

Image description

Clicking on one of the instances with the name of the field should open appropriate tab and focus chosen field.

Image description

It took me about 5 hours to figure all out and fix that issue. I opened PR; however, the maintainer found some phantom issue that I couldn't see from my end. It made me focus on it way harder. Took another 2 weeks understanding why I cannot resolve that issue, but I gave up.

Conclusion

Sometimes we have to take a big challenges to understand our strengths. In my opinion, any fall leads to a new higher peaks. I don't consider it as a fail, I consider it as a new lesson in my life.

Image of Docusign

🛠️ Bring your solution into Docusign. Reach over 1.6M customers.

Docusign is now extensible. Overcome challenges with disconnected products and inaccessible data by bringing your solutions into Docusign and publishing to 1.6M customers in the App Center.

Learn more

Top comments (0)

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs