We continued to build on our git knowledge this week by implementing a contribution workflow. The simulation was very helpful in understanding the process of how to contribute to a project from the beginning to the conflicts we would encounter to the very end. We also read an article about finding a project to contribute to, very resourceful.

Finding a project to contribute to

The article was very informative. I really appreciated the checklist with the guide before finding the project to contribute to. The GitHub explore page was the most useful link I found. After clicking the link it navigated me to my profile and as scrolled I saw suggestion based on the people I follow, the topics I’ve starred, and repositories that I’ve viewed. I found the Facebook/react issue page for tiny features that I wanted to explore. I also signed up for Hacktoberfest, and they have suggestions for first-timers to contribute to. This was very helpful in narrowing down the sites I’d like to contribute to.I’m most likely going to contribute to React since I have some experience with it.

GitHub stuff

Initially I found the workflow intimidating and overwhelming to implement. Once I took some deep breaths I was able to focus on the task at hand. I committed myself to learning through the numerous mistakes I would without a doubt make. We were unable to complete the task during class, so we finished on our later. We first needed to establish how to communicate outside of class and learned that you can tag the username of the person you’d like to contact whether in your issues or in your comments. I made my first mistake when I cloned the repository into a parent folder instead of my team folder, so it only showed the upstream version without the origin. I learned how to update the URL of the existing remote repository. The workflow portion was overwhelming but incredibly useful. I opened an issue and created a feature branch to work on the issue -adding dance styles to favorite songs.

Overall I’m appreciative of the mistakes i make because it allows me to ask for help and learn little tricks that expands my git and GitHub knowledge.

Weekly Summary

We learned about:

• Project Anatomy: What is the structure of a project?
  • People, documentation, tools
• We learned how to contribute to a remote (blessed) project when you cannot modify it yourself, but have to “ask” a maintainer to do this.
• Presentation of a standard practice for contributing to projects: Collaboration Workflow Presentation
• Had a short quiz on Git
• Implemented a team-based activity on the GitHub Workflow.
• Read Section 4 of GitHub’s How To Contribute.
• Browsed the Wikipedia article on Karen Sandler in preparation for the visit by Karen Sandler
• I put a question into the class’s wiki page for Karen Sandler.