This week for my open source development class I was assigned to help a classmate add a optional feature to their dead link checker. The purpose of this was to practice the proper workflow of open source development. Fork -> Clone -> Branch -> Add Feature -> Push -> Pull Request.
Simple enough when you write it out like that but It can actually get complicated when you actually try and FIND something that can be added to someones code!
Skimming through the list of repositories for Release 1.0 I wanted to find a Python project that I could do something in since I have decided for this course I will try and learn at least two languages, one of which will by Python.
Finally after looking through the list I found a project that I was determined to add a feature. What I immediately found was that my classmate was using Requests, which is the same library that I used to make my http requests in my project. I knew what to look for instantly, was my classmate using requests.get or requests.head. One line of code can actually make a huge difference in runtime since .get requests the entire page and .head only requests the headers. Unfortunately for them was using requests.get. But fortunately for me that means I get to fix it for them.
The fix was incredibly small, literally just change requests.get -> request.head. But the process was what I was after, which was not hard either. One thing that I found interesting though it calling the branch that you create the issue number, pretty intuitive and I never though about doing that. Previously I would have to think about what my branch name will be but this is simple and gets the job done. Luckily I had no issues with my pull request and it was merged the next day.
Overall the process was easy and fun, so fun in fact that I decided to create 3 more pull requests for other classmates:
(https://github.com/rjayroso/haystack-link-checker/issues/6)
(https://github.com/HenryZerocool/henz-cli/issues/3)
(https://github.com/rjayroso/haystack-link-checker/pull/9)
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