Interview: How to Join a Major Open Source Project

Recently, my co-editor Aurelio was invited to become a member of the jQuery team. To mark this spectacular achievement and to find out what’s involved in contributing to the most popular JavaScript library in use today, I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

To kick things off Aurelio, could you tell us something about yourself?

Sure. My name is Aurelio De Rosa. I’m a (full-stack) web developer living and working in London. I have more than 5 years’ professional experience programming for the web using HTML5, CSS3, Sass, JavaScript, and PHP. I’m a regular blogger for several networks, speaker, author of books, member of the jQuery team and the JoindIn team, and co-author of some academic papers. I’m also the technical reviewer of several online courses for Learnable and the book “HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World, second edition”. Above all these things, I’m really passionate about everything related to the web (well, not everything…sorry Java). In my spare time I love to experiment, learn, contribute to open source projects, and have a few beers.

Wow! Sounds like you’re a busy guy. What made you decide to get involved with jQuery?

I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about being involved in jQuery as part of the team, it just happened.

Like many developers that have started working on the front end a few years ago, I lived in a world full of browsers issues and inconsistencies. jQuery was (and is) the best solution to avoid dealing with such issues in order to focus on what really mattered: the website. Everyone is aware of the good work that the jQuery team has done over the years and I think this year the web community has recognized the effort by voting to have the jQuery team as one of the finalists of the Net awards in the category “Team of the year” (vote for us!).

As the curious developer that I am, only working with jQuery wasn’t enough for me. So, I often read the documentation of methods I never used and sometimes I even read the source code to learn as much as I could. In performing these activities, I started finding minor inconsistencies or issues in the documentation that I promptly notified to the jQuery team of on GitHub. Sometimes I tried to fix these issues by submitting small pull requests. This is how I started in May 2013, by submitting a pull request to improve the jQuery documentation. I was happy because I was improving a project that I used on a daily basis and that I was really passionate about.

I see. And how did you approach the project?

I probably found the issue that I fixed with my first pull request while reading the documentation to verify something. Then, I started working on my book jQuery in Action, Third Edition and everything changed. When you write a book, you put a lot of effort into it and you go even deeper into the subject compared to what you used to do. This means that often I had to read the source to understand why a method was acting in a certain way or to confirm some statements I wrote in the book. This activity allows you to find documentation inconsistencies, errors, or even undocumented method signatures. For example not so long ago I found that wrapAll() acts like wrap() when passing a function to it, an issue that is corrected in the upcoming version 3 of jQuery.

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by James Hibbard via SitePoint