OSD600 Release 0.2 PR 1

The time has come to start release 0.2! For this release, we start contributing to real open source projects on Github! When I read what we had to do I was excited and nervous at the same time. I never contributed to Open Source and was scared of things such as not being able to find anything I can work on, or start working on an issue then realizing I have taken on something too challenging. What I learned after my first pull request is I was wrong!

I started looking for good first issues on the up for grabs website provided by my professor. It took a lot of searching but I finally found an issue perfect for my first pull request! This repository was working on a cli application to create almost any programming language file. I looked through their issues and found this They wanted people to pick a language and do various things with it such as write a hello world and document how to create inline comments. I noticed they already did SQL but was missing PL/SQL. I already had some knowledge about PL/SQL so I felt comfortable doing this. I made a comment and told them I would like to add PL/SQL. Then I waited. After a while, there was no reply so I decided to go for it and make a PR anyways (either way I saw this is a great opportunity to practice). The set up was very easy as I already had a text editor installed on my laptop and knew the PL/SQL syntax. The code I wrote was a simple PL/SQL block that outputted hello world. Then I added some documentation on how to write inline comments in inlinecomments.txt, and other minor stuff (update read me, modify another document ect..) While I was working on my code I noticed a small typo in one of the other files, so I decided to fix that to and tell them about it. By the time I finished and made my PR they replied to my request to work on this! 

To be honest I didn't think I would have to do any research for this pull request until they replied:
While I took DBS501 at Seneca we always used the .SQL extension while working on PL/SQL. I was shocked when he asked me this. So I started to do some research and learned something I never knew before. When working in PL/SQL the extension can be .sql however, its better practice to use the .pls extension since that indicates it is a PL/SQL script. When I started working on this issue I didn't expect to learn much outside of contributing to open source. I am very happy I got to work on this because I also learned more about PL/SQL. Moral of the story: never think you know everything, there is always something new to learn!








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

OSD600 Intro Post

Introduction: Hello, my name is Joey and I am a student at Seneca studying Computer Programming. My whole life I have always been interested in technology. Towards the end of high school, I enrolled in Computer Science and enjoyed the subject. My passion for technology and love of code persuaded me to get an education in Computer Programming. Why Are You Taking this Class? I am taking this class to help widen my skill set and also because I have always been interested in Open Source. I know many programming technologies such as Java, C++ and SQL but I don't know anything about Open Source. It has been a goal of mine to learn but never had the time to look into it. Therefore, I decided to take this class as I believe this is one of the best opportunities to learn!  What is it About Open Source that Attracted You? The freedom the comes with it. I am fascinated by the idea that anyone can take my code and work with it, and I can do the same to theirs. I believe the more people that co...
Read more

Git Workflow When Contributing to Open Source

The following are the steps/workflow you follow when you find a repository on GitHub and wish to contribute to it.      When you find an issue you wish to work on in a  repository , first fork it to your GitHub, then clone it and make a new branch (you will be working off this new branch. Its a good idea to name the branch after the issue you are planning to fix Eg. issue-2) . When you are done with your code push it to the new branch you made for the issue/feature then create a pull request ( pull request is a review request You are asking someone to check the changes on a branch before merging into another branch. ) The person who owns the code will check your code and if it's approved it will get merged with the original. 
Read more

OSD 600 Lab 2

I really enjoyed this lab as is helped me understand the process/workflow of contributing to open source. I wrote a separate article on that which can be found here .  During this lab, I created an issue  on the original repository saying I wish to implement additional features to the code.  Once I got approval from the original author to do this I forked and cloned the project, created a new branch called issue-2 , and uploaded the code I wrote to it. After that, I made a pull request to the original repository. For my feature, I added the v and version arguments to their command-line tool. The process of getting my work accepted was exciting as I got to hear from the person who wrote the code and learn what it is exactly they want. This a great opportunity to improve on the code you wrote. One problem I had was after I got the feedback I was not sure how to edit code on the issue-2 branch, after doing some research I learned how to switch branches via the git checkout...
Read more