Ionic is an open source mobile UI toolkit for building modern, high quality cross-platform mobile apps from a single code base in pure JavaScript or with a JavaScript framework like React, Angular or Vue.
### Why did I choose this project
I started to use Ionic as a dependency in 2020. It was for a school project/experiment ([BLOCK Covid](https://github.com/alexismch/IPL_PFE_2020_MobileApp])). I found Ionic nice to work with, and I started to use Ionic in other projects ([SEP](https://github.com/Mathieu-COSYNS/sep) in particular). During that time, I found some bugs. One of the bugs was really annoying to me and in February 2022 I decided to open an issue (https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/issues/24747) to fix it. Someone fixed the issue, and I was really glad they did.
For this Open Source Project, I felt that I should fix someone else issue in the Ionic GitHub repository. This is why I choose this project.
### How did I contribute
I started by reading the [contributing guidelines](https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/blob/main/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md). In this document I found several interesting instructions like how to write a PR, how to name commit messages, how to set up the project, how to modify a part of the project, preview changes, run tests, ...
In the [requirement](https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/blob/main/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md#requirements) section of the contributing guidelines:
> Looking for an issue to fix? Look through our issues with the [help wanted](https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22help+wanted%22) label!
This is exactly what I did, and I found this issue : https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/issues/19178. This issue was quite old, and I had an idea how to fix it. Since no progress was made on the issue, I did not ask to be assigned to work on it. I just started to work on a solution immediately.
In a few hours, I cloned the repository, fixed the issue and created a pull request.
I opened my pull request https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/pull/26217 the 3rd of November. I waited, no one sent me feedback, and I found that strange because Ionic is a pretty active repository. Other issues and pull requested were made, and I was wondering if someone looked at my pull request or not. On the 22 of November I decided that I should bring more attention to my contribution but instead of spamming "Did you take a look ???" messages, I decided to open a new feature requested (https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/issues/26337) that can be built on top of the bug I fixed at the beginning of November.
Finally, one of the maintainers took a look at my PR and suggested another approach in a new PR and closed my PR. He merged his PR and gave me co-author credit even though I did not write the merged code.
### What's next
As explained before, I created a new feature requested that can be based on the previous code. This feature request is still open, and I will gladly answer questions, but I will not create a new pull request until I see the need to fix the issue for one of my own project.
### Lessons learned
- When you make a contribution, It's always better to ask before starting to work.
- Even in active repository, maintainers will not always look and take the time to check new contributions, or at least not immediately.
