Initial Pull Requests

This week, I continued working with Git and Github to learn the basics of pull requests, code reviews and more. I collaborated with Tue Nguyen to add functionality to his Static Site Generator: tue-1st-ssg.

Making a contribution

I added support for Markdown files and sent a pull request for him to review. Luckily he liked my code and merged it into his repository.

After chatting with Tue on Slack, he suggested that I could still make improvements in the code I wrote, such as removing unnecessary "if statements". For example, for getting bold text into the tags <b></b> I wrote:

if(param.match(/\*\*([^\*]+)\*\*/)) {
  param = param.replace(/\*\*([^\*]+)\*\*/g, "<b>$1</b>")
}

It's one of those mistakes that are more apparent for someone reviewing the code than for the person spending hours fighting with Regex on regex101.com (aka me!)

I quickly made the changes he suggested, after which I sent another pull request.

Receiving a PR

While I was working on Tue's project, he was busy adding Markdown features on my static-dodo project. He sent me a pull request and I got started reviewing it. I noticed that the program was working only with Markdown files inside a directory when that directory was selected as input like:
./static-dodo -i ./directory
but it did not work when a Markdown file was selected directly as input:
./static-dodo -i ./directory/file.md

I commented on the PR and the next day Tue had updated it and everything was ready to be merged. I am happy that my static-dodo project is slowly improving and that it has become a group effort. It was my first time receiving a Pull Request and it was a great learning experience to get more comfortable with the GitHub interface.

Doing this exercise made me appreciate the fact that writing code, especially in open source, will always be a work in progress, and that there will always be opportunities to improve and identify those sneaky bugs 🐛 along the way.