Reviewing an Open Source Project

This week in my Open Source Development course, we were working on a simple command-line tool that was capable of converting text files to HTML. Before the submission date for this project, we were also tasked with reviewing another person's command-line tool and having our own be reviewed.

Finding a Partner to Collaborate With

In order to find a partner to work with, I took advantage of our course's Slack channel. It was easy as just posting my repository to the channel for someone to review, while also asking if there was anyone that needed their own code to be checked. I stumbled upon paulkim26's project called til-to-html.

Reviewing my Partner's Code

As I was reviewing my partner's code, it was evident that a lot of work had been put into it, as I was barely able to find any major problems. I was able to come up with 5 issues initially, but as I was receiving feedback from my partner, I had misread a part of their code and created an issue that wasn't actually a problem! Therefore I only had 4 issues/suggestions that my partner could work on. The 4 issues were:

• Provide more documentation/warnings for Windows users
• <title> tag not getting updated when there is a title in input files
• Help message could be improved on
• Typos in README

Getting my Code Reviewed

paulkim26 was able to provide plentiful of meaningful issues that I was able to review and update my code. Having an extra pair of eyes look at my code was really helpful as some of these issues I was completely oblivious to until I was notified of it. They were all fairly easy to fix as the issue was clear and concise. My partner listed:

• Use .gitignore to ignore output files that were being generated by the tool
• Need to indicate correct execution script for tool
• Remove unnecessary whitespace within raw HTML
• Replace console.log with console.error when providing errors
• Avoid using "#" characters in filenames

Lessons Learned

Overall, testing and reviewing for another open source project was really helpful as I got to learn how to collaborate through creating issues on GitHub. Although it was quite embarrassing making a few issues that weren't an issue in the first place, I'm hoping to improve from this experience to better myself as an open source developer.

Thanks for reading! See you in the next one.