Week 10
Bitwarden Update
In an effort to contribute something to Bitwarden this week while I understand the code base, I combed the issue page for some low hanging problems I could attempt to solve. In my search, I found that users would often post problems that had more to do with poor direction following/poor local installations than the code base itself. One user I encountered had tried to install the Bitwarden-CLI using Homebrew, ignoring the devs instructions to install using npm.
When I first found the post it had only been up for a few hours and was largely ignored. My initial response was to inform the user that the devs recommended using npm if they’re using an arm64 based mac (they had specified they were using macOS but didn’t give any information about the hardware). To my surprise, in about 15 minutes, the user replied thanking me for my response and informing me that homebrew was indeed downloading the correct installation of the program. I was sad to see the user had yet again ignored the dev’s installation instruction (which I had provided a link to). However, I thought maybe for some reason the user did not want to use npm, and tried recreating the problem. I then uninstalled my npm installation of the program and followed the steps to reproduce. Again to my surprise, the homebrew installation of the program was working and it was an issue with the user’s local environment and not homebrew. I proceeded to follow up with the user, informing them with what I had found. The user thanked me again and promised to follow up with any updates should they find the issue with their setup.
A few hours pass and another user asked if their node installation was up to date. Fortunately, that was the problem with their local environment and the user was able to finally close the issue. Issue triage is something I don’t have much experience in. This was my first experience in ridding a publically available project of an issue that had nothing to do with the code base. I’m glad in the end I was able to contribute a little bit to an issue and actually use my understanding of Bitwarden.