Contributing to Open Source: Polyfill.io

When we write code, we want to work with tomorrow’s standardised features and not yesterday’s. Older browsers are a fact of life, just as supporting every feature in every specific setup is a very frustrating ordeal. Queue Polyfill.io.

Becoming part of the solution

We are big fans of Polyfill.io and use it in all our projects to make sure we can use these fancy new features without losing support for older browsers. This ensures us maintainability on the long term and a better, more usable internet.

Polyfill.io is free to use for everyone and therefore very widely spread. Of course, FOSS (free open source software) should not be taken for granted * so we try to help where we can.

While working on the library behind polyfill.io we noticed a couple of area’s that could use some TLC. Building and testing was slow. This made it harder for the maintainers to quickly handle issues.

So we took the time to profile and benchmark key parts of the library. Our contribution made the entire test process 4 times faster, down to 20 minutes from 1 hour and 20 minutes. Also, we added a flow to rapidly develop and test new features locally. Along the way we also noticed and fixed some bugs.

What was it for?

We hope this will make it easier for the community to build and test new polyfills. Since this is such a useful library.

In return our clients get more stable websites with better legacy browser support, and we’ve chipped in making the internet a little bit better. And that just gives us warm fuzzy feelings.