Darkreader Karl Choi
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
-
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
-
I have previously used Dark Reader before, and I wanted to pick a project that had some personal relevance
-
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
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.
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.
Before my fix
After my fix
