First Open Source Experience

The First Step

Diving into a open source project was intimidating and frustrating, I spent a few hours just trying to get comfortable with the project space. Then I figured I would delve deep into the source code and try to understand how it all came together. This was... a mistake, not because the code is horribly written or anything it's just that I didn't have the time to learn this whole API. It was like trying to put a big puzzle together, It could be done but I had nowhere near the time or patience to do it. So I settled on porting a stat test to use the new Promise API in fs. This is what I think I should have done in the first place, don't dive straight in maybe just wet my feet and see how it feels. I opened up an issue and away I went.

The Nitty Gritty

The test I chose to port was this one. I had some knowledge of stat from the previous post so I could understand almost all of what was going on in here. First of all I made a branch that was call issue-423 (423 being the number on my issue). It was pretty easy to convert to using promises, just import the library, switch the callback to .then/.catch and that was it, I pushed it to my branch and made my pull request and thought I was finished. Except I had a few bugs that I wasn't aware of. Thankfully open-source community was there to help and they pointed out all the things I could improve. For instance changing my test be more promise-friendly and some style fixes, things that I wouldn't have thought of like returning the whole promise since the it() function can handle them. GitHub also made this process really fluid since all changes that I made in my local branch were reflected in the pull request. Even though I made the initial code I felt everyone who posted reviews helped write it.

The Give Back

After getting good feedback and improving my pull request I thought it was about time I re-payed the favor. I basically took what others suggested about my code and applied it to other pull requests. Like here and here. Overall I feel like not only my code got better but I helped other people learn as well. Working in open-source made me fix things that normally I would be too lazy to, it also helped motivate me learn git which I struggled with for quite some time.