Code reviews in open source

So far, I had contributed code to open source repos, however I had not actually done code reviews. To start with code reviews, I decided to review pull requests in IPC144.

I had worked on auditing markdown pages earlier and I decided to review pull requests for it, as there were around 30 issues that needed to be done. I also have a blog post about my audit contribution, Auditing and fixing markdown for IPC144 notes!

Review 1: Audit & fix Information.md

There had already been a review on the pull request, but they had missed some points, so I started a new review:

Images being left aligned

The images should've been centered as per the issue description, however, the code was aligning the images to the left. I left a comment:

Alt text improvement

I also suggested an improvement for the alt text for an image, as I felt that it wasn't very descriptive:

After highlighting these, I requested changes and submitted my review.

Review 2: Audited and fixed expressions.md

This pull request had no reviewers, so I decided to go over it and started a review.

Using quotes to highlight operators

There were operators such as && and || that were being used in the text. But without the code highlighting, it was hard to read and didn't look good, so I left a comment:

Small image not being centered

There was an image which was not being centered horizontally, so:

Slug format

The slug for FrontMatter was not following the standard set out in a different ticket, so I highlighted it:

After adding these comments, I again requested changes and submitted my review.

Takeaways

Doing code reviews in open source was a new experience for me and I found it quite interesting. It is great to have different people review pull requests to identify bugs and problems which ultimately improves the quality of the project.