Release 0.3 — The External Pull Request

The second part of Release 0.3 was to submit a PR in an external repository. Unfortunately, it was even harder for me to find an issue to work on this time around then it was during Hacktoberfest. Perhaps, because there were much more newer issues continuously popping up during the active month of Hacktoberfest in the Open Source World? I don’t know. I stumbled upon a few issues I thought I could tackle. While for one, I got no response to my question, in another I had trouble finding areas in the code that related to the issue I wanted to tackle (I couldn’t find which part of the code the issue was referring to).

After much searching and stumbling, I finally found Nasa/PSP. This repository is Nasa’s core Flight System Platform Support Package. Nasa’s core Flight System is a software framework and a set of reusable software applications used on their flight projects (satellite data systems and instruments). It is written in C and C++. It has been used on missions such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, JSC’s Morpheus Lander, and many more.

The issue I got to contribute to was regarding simplifying some code that unnecessarily was getting the address of the first element of an array instead of just using the array name. In the process, I got to look into and review some C/C++. I used grep to search for instances that required the changes, submitted my PR, and made any requested changes. I was also required to sign a CLA for my changes to be accepted which I had no idea where to do. So as of now, that is still pending.