For my third pull request I was actually able to checkout a project that previous students of my open source class made in this class called Telescope. Telescope is a web server and client application that is used to keep track of Seneca students' blogs; just like the one you are reading right now! Since we were eventually to contribute to the Telescope project later in the semester, I figured I should get a bit of a head start and become a little familiar with the project.
For this issue there was some problems with the validity of specific feeds. However, this issue was not easily solved because the error logging was not working. Thus, for this issue I had to help add error logging for when feeds were not being parsed. This task while is a simple task on paper was still a bit difficult for me to understand. I think my biggest hurdle for this issue was to follow along with what everything was doing. The Telescope project is a fairly large project that has a lot of parts to it so it was really easy for me to feel a bit overwhelmed. However, one of the developers humphd (who is also my professor :winkyface:) made it much easier on me by directing me to which file I would be modifying and what I should take a look at. From there I still wanted to get a bit of an understanding of what was going on so I took the time to read through the code and other files it required from. Despite me feeling very lost at first I was able to understand what I needed to do and managed to make a good pull request. Aside from a little mistake where I missed a part of the code (Whoops!) It was a simple fix where I needed to modify the signature of a function to allow error messages and then store/log the error message.
While it was a quick and easy fix, the process to get there took a while because I had a bit of trouble following along with the code. But after taking the time to read through I was able to figure out what was needed. So after this PR I think I feel a bit more confident in viewing larger projects, its important to remember that you are not expected to know the ins and outs of the entire project. Just reading and understanding the necessary components is all you really need, and you can always ask the developers for help where to look.
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