Friday, December 6, 2019

Wrapping Up Open Source

Wow! How time flew by these past 4 months in this last school semester. This open source class I am taking is coming to an end and it has been a tough and challenging experience. Since the start of this class I have made 8 pull requests, 2 for my release 0.2, 4 for 0.3 and 2 for 0.4. Its crazy because 8 does not seem like a lot but the constant searching for issues and learning new environments and languages is super challenging.

Nov 17 - 23
This week I was looking for new issues to do my 0.4 release and was still working on my first pull request for the Telescope repository. In the beginning I was very confused about what to do and scared to ask for help but ultimately had to ask my professor for help and he clarified a lot of things. I was researching how to implement my pr as a route and still trying to get used to git rebasing and merging conflicts so I could keep up with the new changes in the repository

Nov 24 - 30
This week I finally got my pull request working and merged. It was a tough because in the beginning  I thought it was easy but I did not really understand the context of how to use the opml generator until I talked to my professor again and he helped me a lot. Merging my pr lifted a lot of weight off my shoulders since it was 2 weeks under review and working on it even though we had a 3 weeks for each pr. I always struggle to manage my time and tend to do things late and this class is teaching me a lot about time management. I was able to find my second issue for telescope and I started reading into that.

Dec 1 - 6
This week I worked on Microsoft React Native again and worked on an image rendering issue. The issue (https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows/issues/2635) was to encode and decode progressive image rendering since it is only available on android. I still have no idea what to do so I hope to communicate with the maintainers and get some feedback when I push my code.

The issue(https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/issues/420) for Telescope was not too hard this time. It was 2 files that both used the reading level module and my job was to read through both files to determine which file was needed and see if I could combine them into one. In my pull request(https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/438) I came to the conclusion that I could delete one file and its test completely since the other file did exactly what the deleted file did and more. My pull request is approved but we are waiting for the contributor who wrote the deleted file to see if they are okay with it and if we need their code since he knows it the best.

Final Thoughts
There is a 2nd part to this class next semester but I do not think I will take it since this course was already hard for me as I was under pressure to complete pull requests that I had no idea how to do by a certain date. I liked this course a lot, but I guess I was not ready to fully commit myself to setting aside time to find good issues and find repositories I like. I worked on a lot of JavaScript and HTML code since I know that best but I feel like I should of stepped more outside my comfort zone and tried to learn a new language like Python or C#. I would definitely recommend this class to my classmates since I do believe it is a great learning experience, but for me, I think I should of taken in my 7th semester since I would not have as big as a course load and maybe would of been more mature to really take this class to heart and commit more effort into this. The professor is great though, I do wish he teaches more classes since I feel like I learned a lot from him and especially about Git and working in big projects.

Its been a fun and bumpy ride, but I do believe I can say I genuinely enjoyed the class, it was tough but it opened my eyes to a lot of technology out there and how one simple repository can turn into something big. Maybe one day in the future I will be able to do something like that. First I gotta do a lot of growing up to do as a person and as a programmer.

Bye... for now. 

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