As part of the Release 0.3 project in my open source course (DPS909), I was asked to continue my learning progression from Hacktoberfest by performing internal code reviews on pull requests (PR). "Internal" in this case means a PR in a project repository that is maintained by the class.
The project I chose was Telescope, which is an open source web server and client application for aggregating and presenting a timeline of Seneca's open source blogs.
Code Review 1
I decided to review PR #3768. This PR addresses an issue in the sign up process where the Blog/RSS URL form cannot differentiate between a blog URL and a feed URL, as described here.
To review the code, I checked out the PR on my editor and ran the app on my machine. I followed the testing steps specified in the PR. I also purposely messed up some steps to see how the program would react with the changes. The changes appeared to work as I could input a Blog URL and a feed URL when signing up; I could complete the sign up with the form able to recognize a Blog URL and a Feed URL.
One of the previous reviews of the PR commented with a concern with the backend breaking if a user enters a Feed URL instead of a Blog URL. So I tried to investigate this myself. As I explained in this comment, the current PR changes prevent a function that specifically uses a Blog URL from being called. I also noticed the Blog URL being used when making a call to the database. However, this should also not break the backend because the call is just made to store information in the database.
Code Review 2
For the second code review, I reviewed PR #3769. This review was a little simpler, as it was a a UI change to the top navigation bar of the web page. The changes to the files included CSS adjustments and a new button at the top right of the page. The only feed back I could give was in this comment I left. I suggested to match the top nav bar with the side nav bar that appears when a user scrolls down; mostly for UI consistency.
Conclusion
Doing these code reviews, I realized that it was good to review all types of PRs no matter the complexity. I spent a lot of time trying find complex ones but even the most miniscule, like a UI change/addition, needs input from multiple people before being approved.
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