Learning Collaboration

Greetings,

Today's blog post is brought to you in a very fancy Q&A format. For context, our current assignment is to develop an AI CLI tool then review a fellow student's tool. This is to teach us about collaboration and how to work together using Git and GitHub. So, onto the Q&A:

Q: How did you go about doing your code reviews? Do you prefer an async or sync approach? Why?

A: For this assignment me and my group mate decided to do a voice call so that we could talk about the code and quickly ask each other questions about it. I feel like this synchronous method worked well for us as we could quickly create git issues and fully understand what the underlying issue was.

Q: What was it like testing and reviewing someone else's code? Did you run into any problems? Did anything surprise you?

A: This was definitely a new experience, I am used to others looking at my code such as professors, or colleagues. However, I’ve never really done reviewing another person's work myself. Thankfully, my group mate was very understanding and we worked together to give each other good critiques that ultimately improved both our projects.

Q: What was it like having someone test and review your code? Were you surprised by anything?

A: While I am always nervous to show my code to others. I know that it is good to have another set of eyes look over your code. They will find bugs and improvements that I could never have thought of. This was also the most surprising part, some of the fixes and suggestions were so simple, I’m surprised I didn’t think of them myself.

Q: What kind of issues came up in your testing and review? Discuss a few of them in detail.

A: Nothing too major, my group mate had made quite an effective program. That created project level readme from source code files. Some of the issues were syntax issues in the readme and some minor quirks in the way to run the program.

Q: What issues did you file, and what were they about?

A: I think an interesting issue was Issue #5, the project had excellent installation and setup steps, however there was no step to actually run the program. This has since been rectified.

Q: What issues were filed on your repo, and what they were about?

A: I think the worse issue was Issue #2, When I had originally published my tool I had forgotten to make an easy way to use it on the command line. Quite an obvious mistake I’m glad my groupmate found. Another bad one was Issue #4, where the program would still try to process a file even if the file did not exist.

Q: What did you learn through the process of doing the testing and reviewing?

A: Throughout this process, I learned that I am actually not very good at describing at effectively describing the problem within someone's code. Now that I know that, I hope I can work on that skill and effectively communicate that information going forward. Additionally, I really think that reviewing and testing code really improves the program overall and within my personal projects I will strive to do more of that.