Fixing My Laptop by Contributing to the Linux Kernel

When I first bought my laptop (an Acer Nitro 5) and installed Linux on it ( as one does with a brand new PC, obviously ) I noticed that no matter what I tried, I just could not get the headphone jack to detect the microphone. This is an issue that I had revisited multiple times over the course of a year and it had even persisted across distros! This led me to believe that the issue was in the kernel and sure enough, after a bit of research this had been the case. Around this time a few of my clu