What the project is

Dark Reader is a chrome extension that automatically applies a dark theme to sites that the user visits. The github community works together mainly to fix specific site issues, add new color themes, and add new features.

Why I picked it

  1. Since I don’t really have experience with contributing to an open source project, I wanted to pick a project I thought I would be actually be able to contribute to

  2. I have previously used Dark Reader before, and I wanted to pick a project that had some personal relevance

  3. The project seemed to have good onboarding

Comm Arch Analysis

  • The last commit was 3 days ago, so the project is pretty active.
  • There are over 1200 contributors
  • The contribution doc was pretty detailed and explained step by step how to contribute.
  • The project has a license, readme, and code of conduct
  • There are 1,000+ open issues, so there are many things that can be fixed or contributed to
    Last commit
    Contributors
    Important docs
    Issues

The issue I picked

Contributions to the Dark Reader Github are mainly specific site fixes, so the issue I picked was a site for a transit system I used while I was in Seattle, Washington: myorca.com. The issue was that several instances of text and icons were not visible in the dark mode applied by the Dark Reader extension. Orca logo

How I went about pursuing it

I read the contributing doc on the Github for step by step instructions on how to fix specific issues on websites. I was then able to make the texts/icons visible through the extension’s dev tools. One issue I had was trying to work with the extension’s specific code formatting. In addition, most of the project is coded in TypeScript, which I don’t really have experience in. However, I was eventually able to figure it out. I submitted a pull request, so I’m currently waiting for that to go through. There are only 5 open pull requests (including mine) and 7,000+ closed pull requests, so pull requests seem to be reviewed pretty frequently. Dev Tools Languages Pull Requests

Before my fix

Before1 Before2

After my fix

After1 After2