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Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor


A rundown of my experience finding and fixing a bug in the Chromium/Google Chrome browser - specifically in the devtools. It includes details about the bug itself as well as notes about what it was like working on the Chromium project as a first-time contributor.

This is a rather niche area of impact since most web developers will never have the need to write custom realtime audio processing code or things like that - which probably explains why this bug was left unfixed for several years. I doubt that many people have a good understanding of how all its components fit together even at a high level, and the codebase is constantly changing + growing with dozens of commits being added per hour at busy times. Features like go-to definition (which I usually rely on heavily when navigating codebases) and find references didn't work well or at all, and one of my CPU cores would stay stuck at 100% permanently while the project was open.

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