Release 0.4, My Experiences
I wanted to talk about my experiences about contributing to GitHub as a whole on projects. What I’ve learnt along the way, and my next steps. This has been an incredible course, and really helped me in terms of my confidence with contributions.
First, I want to talk about my experiences with OpenWPM. It was a repo by the Mozilla team that I saw on my GitHub feed, and I felt comfortable with contributing, as it was in Python. My task was to change up the Status Queue from a Tuple[str,str] into a special Status object.
We’ve discussed this in the past, talking about the stuff that we needed to do.
So, I got to work! I knew that I needed to parse the Tuples into a readable object, so I made a simple Object called ‘Status’ and it parses the data, and stores it into the Object.
While the Object itself works fine, unfortunately we found out that the Status Queue was intertwined with other modules, and we had to postpone the changes, at least until we found out how the Status Queue is used.
Even though I didn’t push my PR, it made me learn a lot about developing in general. I had to run my own version of OpenWPM for testing, check my own code if it conflicts with other files, and test my own Status module to see if it’s created properly. The journey was the best part.
After that OpenWPM issue, I made one more easy PR before things started to get awry. GitHub recommended me another PR. It was an A.I tool that developed pictures. I noticed that they’re using an older version of GCD (greatest common denominator), and the code would break if they used Python 3.10. I made a simple, easy fix.
From what I’ve experienced in this course, it’s been a journey. I’m very grateful for everything. It’s been rough, but I felt like the entire course, especially the professor (thank you, Dave) really cares about your success.
I’m excited for DPS911, and I know it’s going to be great.