Reviewing PRs

#beginners #opensource #programming #github

Hello everyone! 🙋🏻‍♀️

Today, I reviewed multiple Pull Requests that were made to our internal class projects. I wanted to contribute to one of the newer ones, so I decided to start with Seneca's VSCode extension. Plus, I really liked the idea of what it can become.

1️⃣ First pull request

Link: https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/vscode-seneca-college/pull/13

The first pull request that I found was made by @IvaniGabrovsky and it included changes related to the creation of the CONTRIBUTING.md and README.md files.

CONTRIBUTING.md's purpose is to have instructions for the contributors and an overview of the project to help them get started with the changes. Meanwhile, README.md's primary audience are the users and it should tell what the tool is, how to use it and any additional helpful info. It also serves as the first stop point when learning about the project.

Ivan made a great job, however there were many places for improvement, some of which were already outlined by the professor, @humphd, and another student, @SerpentBytes.

I decided to still take a look. I started a review after giving my first comment and ended it with the request for changes.

I focused on multiple areas such as:

grammar, as these files represent the project and cannot have big grammar mistakes (influences reputation);
wording and content, as I have read through many similar files for other projects, I can tell what are some important steps and can give suggestions;
guide for other comments, as Ivan sometimes asked for help through personal messages, I wanted to guide him where I can and give some recommendations for previously mentioned issues.

Ivan responded to every suggestion very quickly and made all corresponding changes.

2️⃣ Second pull request

Link: https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/vscode-seneca-college/pull/12

I continued to review pull requests in the same project and found this one, which was made by @P-DR0ZD and focused on setting up Gitpod for the project. It created main Gitpod files and added information about Gitpod setup to the README.md.

First, I had to research about Gitpod, as I do not have much experience about it and in order to test it I need to figure out what is expected. After some googling and looking through its documentation, I figured out that it allows to setup development environments to work on the projects online which is very helpful to get contribution going.

First, I check the link provided in the new README.md file and it worked perfectly. I could open VSCode through Gitpod and the project would be automatically prepared for me.

I also checked out new Gitpod yaml configuration file which looked good to me. I think it was prebuilt by Gitpod, so no possible syntax mistakes.

However, I had one suggestion. I looked through the documentation for .gitpod.yml and noticed that they have support for VSCode extension recommendations. I also went to .vscode/extensions.json in our project, as it is where recommended extensions would usually be specified, and found one - "amodio.tsl-problem-matcher". So, I suggested to include it for Gitpod as well.

Overall experience 🙌

Overall, it was very helpful experience to get on the other side of pull requests. I learned about new tools and used my existing knowledge from my previous experiences to help make more qualitative changes.