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Yuan-Hsi Lee
Yuan-Hsi Lee

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Pull Request

Creating pull requests is something big for me. As a rookie programmer, I don't have the confidence to contribute to other people's code. Therefore, it took me a while to view different repos from my classmates, trying to find a repo that I can contribute to.

Luckily, I found some repos that haven't implemented all optional features. The first pull request I sent is fixing the version argument feature. In this project, passing arguments like "--version", or "/v" is supposed to return the current version of the npm package. I noticed that the version being returned is not the current version. Instead, it is a hardcoded string. I wrote the code to change it to return the current version number instead.

In the meantime, I receive two pull requests to my repo. The first one is a simple grammatical corrections which I do appreciate since English is not my first language. The second one is adding Wayback machine feature. The concept of Wayback is new to me, therefore, I am grateful for having someone bringing this new stuff to me and adding it to my repo.

To accomplish the requirements of our lab, I would need to find one classmate's repo and add a new feature to it. I want to keep working on C#, which is the new language that I want to focus on this semester, therefore, I chose my C# partner's repo to contribute. I sent the adding reading directory feature pull request. Basically, this new feature allows users to pass a directory or a single file. The application will automatically detect if the passing argument is a file or a directory. If it is a directory, the application will read all the files in the directory and check the links in these files respectively. Because of working on this pull request, I get more familiar with the Directory class in C#.

I am so grateful to my C# partner. Because of my lack of experience, I did not know the distinction between different solution configurations. I tried to run the application without specifying solution configurations and it returned the unexpected outputs. My C# partner was patient and spent lots of time with me, helping me figure it out.

Sending pull requests and contribute to other people's repos is amazing. I gain new knowledge and experience and being contributed at the same time. I believe this is the charm of the open-source community.

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