Hacktoberfest — Week Two

I’ll be honest and say the PR I did this week only served the purpose of increasing my PR count for Hacktoberfest. I didn’t have much time this week to find something interesting to do so I worked on this issue I found a couple weeks ago. It was a simple fix; I added two functions to support additional functionality.

As easy as it was, creating the actual PR was a bit of an exercise. The upstream repo was now a couple commits ahead of my fork so I had to rebase my branch and fix a few minor conflicts. Luckily, our Open Source class had gone over how that works just a couple days prior so I didn’t have to dig around git documentation too much. The best thing about this experience is the experience itself. I sat through the class and understood everything we were told about rebasing and merge conflicts but now that I have actually gone through it myself I have an even better idea of how it works and how potentially complicated it can get. The practice beat the theory.

Rebase aside, the most important thing for me this week is I have finally picked a project I’m interested in working in! If Me is a website that fosters a community where people can share stories and experiences with regards to mental health. It’s something that hits close to home for me and its something I would be proud to be able to contribute to.

The repo can be found here. Its coded in Ruby which I have no experience in but I’ve been looking at the code and getting advice from friends and the If Me community. I also found a few issues that I am looking into but I’ll save that for next weeks blog post.