Saturday, December 30, 2017

My Christmas Journey: Fixing bugs. Part 1

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

A bit later after my holidays, I remembered that I need to finish my assignment for Open Source Development. I have planned how I was going to work on it in this blog post. I planed to work on it for 1 month instead of 9 days, but due to personal reasons, I couldn't do that. So here I am: 7 days before the deadline(It's not 7 hours, so I think it's quite doable).

As I expected the bug I planned to work on about a month ago has been already silently fixed, so I didn't even get any email notifications about activity on the issue I have been following on the GitHub. That happened a few days ago and of course I got stressed out. So I have asked my friend, Ray Gervais (link to his blog), to recommend me some interesting developing project and he did.

He was contributing to a CSS Framework based on Flexbox called Bulma. Even though originally I was planning to concentrate more on Node.js, JavaScript and React, I thought it might been a good idea to see how CSS Frameworks work from the inside.

So I picked up a new bug. This experience started with "Oh my God, this is amazing!" comment. When you start contributing to a new project you need to set up an environment, download all the technologies you may not have on your computer... Well, apart from forking the repository and cloning it locally, I spent 5 minutes on setup: npm install and npm start (to run the project). It would be a bit longer if you don't have node.js on your machine, but it is still faster than a lot of other large projects.

I have started looking into the code. And at some point I asked myself "what am I trying to do here?". Originally I thought the requester meant to add an ability to write buttons with different sizes, that was already implemented(I wish I read the docs, I just found a piece of code), so I contacted my friend again just to confirm that I am not going crazy and it already exists.

Spoiler: later that day the requester made his idea clearer, but I think that should be reviewed by somebody who maintenance the project first.

Still it was a nice experience getting familiar with a new code, but I didn't find my bug yet...
Next part of the blog is available here.


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