This week on The Contributor: A review of the evaluation process just in time for the project search semifinals.

Sidebar: Lessons from my first merged code contribution.

You commit often?
And Other Open Source Pick Up Lines

Before I reveal my top 3 project choices, I’ll take a step back and build some suspense by reflecting on the evaluation process behind these decisions. Last week was more similar to a speed dating round, where I casually clicked through some projects and formed an opinion based off of a limited inspection. For this episode, I got to know some projects a little more by taking a closer look at their activity levels, code bases, documentation, and discussion interactions. There was even an official evaluation template provided by our professor, so I guess you can say things are getting pretty serious.

The evaluation process was more tedious most times than difficult, and information being very hard to find for a project was a telling sign of the project’s viability as a candidate. I learned a lot about advanced Github issue searching.

We Go Together Like Markdown and HTML

An issue came up during my first evaluation with fellow team members Daniel and Jessica regarding combining HTML with Markdown. We didn’t even realize it until after submitting a pull request because the VSCode Markdown Preview didn’t have any issues, but Github Markdown broke for our file. Eventually we figured out it was a spacing/indent problem around HTML
tags that was causing surrounding markdown formatting to not get applied.

And now, finally, the moment you’ve definitely been waiting for.
Keyboard tap drumroll please…….

Top 3 Projects

All of these projects were welcoming, super active, and directly relevant for my growth as a software developer.

• Gatsby
  • This project is built on top of React, which I’ve been planning to get more experience with.
• Visual Studio Code
• Electron

Purple Haze

My contribution to the openstreetmap-website repo was merged this week! Purple has never looked better. Now that I’ve officially gone through a full contributing cycle, I’ve realized many important lessons were learned/re-emphasized along the way:

• Follow the Git Workflow - I accidentally made the pull request from the master branch of my fork instead of a feature branch, and learned the hard way why it should be done that way. Luckily it didn’t affect my pull request too much, but it could have been worse.
• Double check code styling - I didn’t fix a linter problem before creating the pull request which delayed my pull request a bit since maintainers moved on while I was fixing a file length issue.
• Make sure a feature is necessary - Arguably one of the most important. I really wanted to implement email linking for semi-colon separated lists of emails, but the data showed it simply wasn’t relevant enough to warrant the code complexity that would be introduced.

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Which project will get the final fork and be chosen for a semester long commitment? Find out next time on the Semester Finale of The Contributor: Project Search !

Credits:

Consulting Producer
stewartweiss

Starring
boubascript as Himself

Guest Starring
stewartweiss as Professor
dmallia17 as Daniel
wongjessica as Jessica

Writer
boubascript

Head Markdown Formatter
boubascript

Pun Operator
boubascript