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Chris Pinkney
Chris Pinkney

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Issues are hard, Or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the PR-bomb

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Dr. StrangePush strikes again. 6 issues? Really? With my code? Can I speak to your manager? Do you know how long I’ve been doing this for? Almost 2 years now. Damn that’s kind of embarrassing now that I’ve said it out loud.

Today I got some really great suggestions (and even 2 PRs!) from a classmate of mine. One of the things I’ve dreaded about throwing myself into the Open Source community turned out to be… not that big of a deal?

So for this week’s activity we have to fork, analyze, and suggest issues for our fellow classmate’s release 0.1. So, I found someone who decided to do their release 0.1 in Java, a language which I hate lack familiarity in, and with a framework (Selenium) on top of that too! Very interesting approach, two things which I’m unfamiliar with. We went back and forth a bit, turns out he didn’t have a partner either and admittedly hates Python (Really?) but agreed to review my code if I did his in turn.

The first problem was that the code just would not run. At all. We were both stumped. @pyvelkov reached out to our professor, turns out in order to run Selenium’s Chrome backed web driver I had to have Chrome actually installed on my desktop. It’s okay Chrome fanatics, we all have our faults (wait a minute...) Anyway, once Chrome was installed the program worked as expected. Eh, it’s not god-tier snek, but it works, I guess.

My first action was to make a PR and edit his README.md to clarify that Chrome must be installed in order for his project to work as expected. Following that I “fixed” an ambiguous error catch and made another PR. A few other typos and minor changes and that was about all the issues I could find.

Conversely, my partner also found very similar issues with my project, and even made a really insightful (well, I think it’s insightful) PR to variable names in a for-in loop I was using- despite not knowing Python. Well done!

I might have saved changes to my local fork before making a new branch and adding- but that’s okay, that’s what git revert is for. Something-something pencils have erasers. All in all, it was a very pleasant experience. My partner was great. We learned, we laughed, we grew. And now we probably hate each other.

Looking forward to more contributions!

-Chris

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