Reflection On A Month's Worth of Contributions

As this first week of March comes to an end, so does my first month of contributions to (public) Github repos. It was an interesting experience, and I learned quite a bit from it. I learned how to use Git more effectively, how to set up various environments for open source projects, and the basic do's and don'ts (like watching out for spurious whitespace changes!). I also gained more confidence in my skills -- enough so to start pushing my own work to Github and join the very active modding community for Stardew Valley. This was something I've wanted to do for literal years, but fear kept me away. Now, though, I've got one published mod and another in the works... And maybe some plans to help out the community by helping to update the old, open-source mods that have broken as the game's been updated.

All that, thanks to a little confidence boost from a few Github contributions.

Of course, I still have my hang-ups -- I still struggle with imposter syndrome, still struggle with anxieties of all different flavours. But I can't -- won't -- let that diminish what I've achieved this month, or tear down that little boost in my self-confidence.

So, without further ado, let's take a look at these contributions that have done so much for me.

EmberJS

Blog Post: Here

Pull Request: Here

Contributing to EmberJS was an eye-opening experience -- mostly because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and had definitely bit off more than I could chew. For some reason, it never occurred to me that writing documentation for something you've never used may not be the best idea. If I'm being honest, I was really just drawn in by the label of "good first issue" and "documentation" -- one meant it was good for beginners, the other meant I wouldn't have to touch the code (which I was afraid to do, at that point). Considering the task beyond "is this a good first issue?" didn't really come up until after I started to work on the documentation I'd promised.

On the bright side, if I had to make a mistake like that, I'm glad it was in my first pull request, and not one later down the road. This is definitely a lesson best learned early on, if only to avoid frustration and headache in dealing with future issues.

As far as the status of my pull request goes, I'm still waiting on some feedback from the maintainers.

Filer - Contribution 1

Blog Post: Here

Pull Request: Here

Ah, Filer. My favourite project I've worked on this month -- you can tell because I went back to it for my fourth contribution, too. This is where I discovered that I enjoy creating tests, and also where I confirmed that yes, web-related projects are my main area of interest. I also learned about spurious whitespace changes here, and by extension, not to use Visual Studio Code's auto-formatter when working on projects that aren't mine. ...At least, not until I can stop it from adding whitespace everywhere. Haven't seen an option to turn that off yet, but I'm still looking.

Despite adding whitespace everywhere, though, my PR was still merged, along with a few words of wisdom from my professor.

Mocha

Blog Post: Here

Pull Request: Here

I'm not sure what prompted me to look at Mocha -- it might have popped up in the "recommended repositories" in Github's explore page. Either way, I ended up browsing through the repo's issues, looking exclusively for "good first issue" tags, which led me to what I thought would be an easy fix. It was just some changes to a web page--remove a "/" here, add some attributes "external" there, change a "span" to a "div". Easy stuff. I made some dumb mistakes, like forgetting to put the unit of measurement at the end of height and width attributes in the CSS (I know, I know. I should know better, having worked with CSS for years). But it was all easy fixes, right up until two contributors started arguing over the best way to do things.

With so many conflicting reviews and opinions, I didn't really know what changes I should or should not make. One of the contributors went and opened a PR of their own. The other one followed suit a few days later. I sat back and just let things unfold, unsure of what to do in this situation. All three PRs were eventually closed, with one -- not mine -- being merged. The one that was merged did have my commits in it, though, so my work was at least useful in some way. That's something, right?

Filer - Contribution 2

Blog Post: Here

Pull Request: Here

My fourth contribution featured Filer again. Like in week 2, I decided to try my hand at writing a few more tests -- something that I apparently enjoy doing. I really don't have as much to say about this one as I do the others -- partly because it all went very smoothly, and partly because my PR has yet to be checked by anything other than Codecov and the automatic tests. It passes said tests, and Codecov reports an increase in coverage, which is a very good sign.

I will say, though, I am expecting some changes to be requested on this one. I'm new to Chai, testing, etc. and I'm sure that one of my "expect(error).to.be..." or something similar is better replaced by something else. The maintainers on the project will undoubtedly know more than me on the matter.