Fatherhood
I’m a dad.. I think
Yesterday was an interesting day. Between braving the mixture of high winds, freezing rain and flurries, I managed to make it to and from the store with my weekly grocery haul. While navigating the packed aisles, I paid closer attention to those around me. It was interesting how everyone went about their way — some frantically throwing produce into their cart; others strolling along with their children; and of course, those oblivious individuals causing a traffic jam with their cart 😤
The situation resembled a micro-community of sorts and it relates to the direction I’m headed for the next little while. I’ve become a parent. Not the kind of parent to a little Sean or Shauna, but to a new project — Creative Collab:
Fatherhood
With my new found responsibilities, I’ve begun supporting a project that incorporates community, collaboration, and celebration. I see my role as an enabler; one who will guide new and experienced contributors to help shape the future of this project.
While I’m nowhere close to being an actual Dad IRL, this experience may as well be my first real trial of parenting, in the form of code reviews.
Initial Thoughts
I never would’ve believed that code reviews took so long —yesterday I spent more than a few hours going through a handful of pull requests. Some needed a tiny bit of polishing whilst others required a bit more guidance to pass the finish line.
During my reviews, I became careful not to introduce scope creep. If I saw an opportunity for improvement, I had to make sure it was relevant to what the pull request fixed and not a feature I wished for.
Learning Through Observing
Having worked on all kinds of codebases, I’ve grown tremendously from exposure to foreign syntax. It’s made me ask questions, seek answers, and ultimately expanded my own toolkit. The same trend occurred during my reviews — I had to understand why the contributor chose their route instead of another, and really get into their mindset.
Check out the awesome contributions that we’ve received so far:
- Add text editors and create a test page with new editors — https://github.com/Mera-Gangapersaud/Creative-Collab/pull/8
- Create a
CONTRIBUTING.mddocument — https://github.com/Mera-Gangapersaud/Creative-Collab/pull/16 - Add continuous integrating with TravisCI — https://github.com/Mera-Gangapersaud/Creative-Collab/pull/17
- Improve the existing story container — https://github.com/Mera-Gangapersaud/Creative-Collab/pull/19
Curious as to how you can help? Find something over at our Issue Tracker, open your own issue or chat with us on Slack!
In Other News
Working in open source means that your efforts are spread, whether it be for the same project or something else.
During the downtime for Creative Collab, I’ve been also helping out with Supernova. My work as a contributor falls more on the tooling side of things.
Having introduced TravisCI in #9 — Add initial TravisCI config file, I aimed my efforts on publishing artifacts with GitHub Releases in #18: Automatically publish artifacts to GitHub. The latter PR should automatically upload the build executables for Supernova, making it much easier to download, distribute, and use.
Final Thoughts
Now that I’ve been in the OSS realm for >1 year, I have even more respect for the individuals who dedicate their time reviewing my PR’s, especially those from AMO *cough* Kumar, Will, and Bob *cough*. As they and countless others have shown me patience time and time again, it’s my turn to do so:
I’ll leave you with a quote by Simon Sinek, a British-American author and motivational speaker:
On that note, I think I hear one of my children calling for attention! Gotta run! 🏃🏽♂️
Sean 👨🏽💻
