DEV Community: Isabella Liu

A meaningful and interesting journey

Isabella Liu — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 07:19:45 +0000

The most important thing that I want to express is that I really appreciate professor David's help and guidance throughout the course.
The most important thing that I want to express to myself is that I'm sorry, and thank you. I'm sorry that I had not pushed myself hard enough to make bigger progress, and I have wasted too much time and energy fighting with my own feelings and imposter syndrome, which should not have taken so much of my time and energy. I should have spent more on the real stuff that I should try to work on. But I am also grateful for not giving up and tried my best to survive till the end. God knows how many times I have considered dropping the course.

Progress of Release 0.4.2

Isabella Liu — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 07:01:51 +0000

Last post I introduced the project that I'm going to work on for Release 0.4. So the second step is to learn how to contribute and start contributing.

Step One - Release 0.4

Isabella Liu — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 06:18:35 +0000

For Release 0.4, I am supposed to find a proper issue to work on for three weeks. It should not be too easy to complete, nor too hard. I tried hard to target a satisfactory one, but I cannot.
I was super upset a week ago, and I went to my professor asking if I can skip this assignment since my marks should be enough to get a pass. Professor David is such a nice and patient professor that his words made me feel so much better and dragged me out of the depression that I fell in. He even helped me to find a proper issue to work on.
https://github.com/ContactAssistApp/mobile/issues/141 is an issue about localization that David helped me find. I checked on it and found out that this is a project that I need to work on using XCode. My Macbook is too old to run XCode successfully, so I had to give up on this one and tried to find a new one on localization.

https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/4360 is the one that I think maybe I should try to work on. I left a message to the owner asking if I can try it, the author sent me the link to learn how to contribute. So the next step would be learning how to contribute.

Lab 9

Isabella Liu — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 05:48:42 +0000

For this lab, we are going to find a platform to release our package. I choose pkg.go.dev for my Go program https://github.com/isabellaliu77/urlChecker. But the release process was terrible.

Created the release on GitHub is pretty easy, I added a tag and created the release following the instruction. https://github.com/isabellaliu77/urlChecker/releases/tag/v1.0.1

I checked the documentation for the release. However, I don't quite understand it. I knew every word but didn't know what it meant. I asked my classmate for help, and finally, understood the meaning. This is the link I need to use
https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/isabellaliu77/urlChecker

Problems

The old go doc website can find my package.

But when I visit the new website pkg.go.dev, nothing is there. I refresh it lots of times. But it didn't help.

After several days, I realize that for some reason, my package name on my go.mod file is not following the standard.

I changed the module name, then waited for about an hour. Finally, the problem was solved.

This is the package. https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/isabellaliu77/urlChecker

Unit Test & Github Action

Isabella Liu — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 05:39:59 +0000

The task for lab 8 is to add unit tests and CI to my urlCHECKER program, which was created in the former labs. I spent some time learning about unit test in Golang, and the grammar is not that hard in Go, which can be told from the example below:

func TestExtractURL(t *testing.T) {
    result := extractURL("https://www.google.ca, https://www.facebook.com")

    expected := []string{"https://www.google.ca", "https://www.facebook.com"}
    if !reflect.DeepEqual(result, expected) {
        t.Errorf("Expected: %v, but got: %v", expected, result)
    }
}

The terminal will show the below information after the test is run successfully.

To run the code coverage tool I used for my project, the below commands need to be run:

go test -coverprofile cover.out 
go tool cover -html=cover.out

Github action

name: Go

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:

  build:
    name: Build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:

    - name: Set up Go 1.x
      uses: actions/setup-go@v2
      with:
        go-version: ^1.13

    - name: Check out code into the Go module directory
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Build
      run: go build -v ./...

    - name: Test
      run: go test -v ./...

The CI workflow result can be found through the following link:

https://github.com/isabellaliu77/urlChecker/actions

Linter

For the linter, the package needs to be got using the below command, which I have learned the hard way.

    - name: Lint
      run: |
           go get -u golang.org/x/lint/golint
           golint ./...

Release 0.3.2

Isabella Liu — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 06:10:11 +0000

For the Telescope contribution part, I found a very simple issue to work on, which made me happy for several days. The issue is https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/issues/1261. David pointed out that the system would throw an error saying no .env file while there is one.

$ docker compose up --build
...
telescope_1      |
telescope_1      | > @seneca/telescope@1.3.0 start /telescope
telescope_1      | > node src/backend
telescope_1      |
telescope_1      | [ 2020-11-01 20:00:18.247 ] ERROR (17 on af53c261a8b0):
telescope_1      |
telescope_1      |  💡 It appears that you have not yet configured a .env file.
telescope_1      |     Please refer to our documentation regarding environment configuration:
telescope_1      |     https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/blob/master/docs/CONTRIBUTING.md
telescope_1      |
telescope_1      | [ 2020-11-01 20:00:18.318 ] INFO  (17 on af53c261a8b0): Attempting to use default env in /telescope/env.example instead.

I read the comments below this issue, and found that c3ho already mentioned how to solve this problem. I followed his guide and found it did solve the problem, although I don't fully understand the difference. The change I've made is as below:

The pull request is https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1320.

release 0.3.1

Isabella Liu — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 04:15:03 +0000

For the external contribution, I worked on a CI/CD area for this repo. The pull request address is https://github.com/kaspanet/kaspad/pull/1130.

This repo is using Jenkins to build and test, they want to try something new. I suggest that they can try Github actions which is awesome for this kind of job.

I added a go.yaml file to complete this task. The code I added:

name: Go

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  build:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        go-version: [1.15.x]
        os: [ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest]
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    steps:
    - name: Set up Go 1.x
      uses: actions/setup-go@v2
      with:
        go-version: ^1.15

    - name: Check out code into the Go module directory
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Build
      run: go build -v .

    - name: Test
      run: go test -v .

After I did some tests, I noticed that the code build on windows always gets an error.

I think this is an error they need to solve, instead of a bug of GitHub actions.

Static Analysis Tool

Isabella Liu — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 05:01:13 +0000

This week we covered the commonly used static analysis tools. After watching David's lecture, I feel lucky and happy that I chose to learn some Golang language while taking this course. Go has made things much easier and reduced unnecessary conflicts by forcing users to follow only one rule of formatting. It's meaningless to fight for which kind of indentation we should take, or if the curly braces should take another line or not.

For the formatting, actually, there is no need for me or any contributor to do manual formatting with Go, since Go would save the code to its pre-defined format. The following command can help to format the code too:

gofmt -w filename.go

I chose Golint for the linter, and the user can execute the below command to force checking:

golint filename.go

For the IDE Integration, I used VS Code, and the file setting.json under .vscode has been updated automatically after changing the setting of the extension.

Connecting to Telescope

Isabella Liu — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 04:52:38 +0000

Setup environment

I tried to set up the telescope environment on my Windows PC. I installed wsl2 and Ubuntu. I also followed the instruction
of the document. Some commands like systemclt start init.d failed.

Then I gave my old MacBook air a try. Docker runs well.

But when I did npm install, there were some warnings, and When I ran
npm start there was an error.

It was frustrating that I had to go back to wsl, and installed Redis and Elasticsearch as native applications. And I learned how to run a program as a background Damon.

Redis-server
ctrl-z
bg

Change the code.

My linkChecker can check urls from a file, and the logic of my program is processing the file content into a string. So I had to convert the body of each post to a string.
I added one flag variable to check from the url http:localhost:3000, and extract all the posts to a string. Here is the change I have made.

diff --git a/helpers.go b/helpers.go
index 74ffce1..6c2a61e 100644
--- a/helpers.go
+++ b/helpers.go
@@ -17,6 +17,11 @@ import (
    "mvdan.cc/xurls/v2"
 )

+type Post struct {
+   ID  string
+   URL string
+}
+
 // extract all urls from the string and return them as a slice (array)
 func extractURL(str string) []string {
    rxStrict := xurls.Strict()
@@ -24,6 +29,37 @@ func extractURL(str string) []string {
    return foundUrls
 }

+func parseFromTelescope() []string {
+   var allPostBody []byte
+   resp, err := http.Get("http://localhost:3000/posts")
+   if err != nil {
+       panic(err)
+   }
+   defer resp.Body.Close()
+
+   body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
+   if err != nil {
+       panic(err)
+   }
+   var posts []Post
+   if err := json.Unmarshal(body, &posts); err != nil {
+       panic(err)
+   }
+   for _, post := range posts {
+       resp, err := http.Get("http://localhost:3000" + post.URL)
+       if err != nil {
+           log.Fatal(err)
+       }
+       defer resp.Body.Close()
+       body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
+       if err != nil {
+           log.Fatal(err)
+       }
+       allPostBody = append(allPostBody, body...)
+   }
+   return extractURL(string(allPostBody))
+}
+
 //Function to parse ignore URLs from provided ignore file path
 func parseIgnoreURL(ignoreFilePath string) []string {
    var ignoreURLs []string
diff --git a/urlChecker.go b/urlChecker.go
index 9c97457..41ab8c4 100644
--- a/urlChecker.go
+++ b/urlChecker.go
@@ -25,6 +25,8 @@ func main() {
    // ignore url flag
    ignoreFlag := flag.BoolP("ignore", "i", false, "ignore url patterns")

+   telescopeFlag := flag.BoolP("telescope", "t", false, "check from telescope")
+
    flag.Parse()
    //deal with non-file path, giving usage message
    if len(os.Args) == 1 {
@@ -113,11 +115,27 @@ func main() {
            return
        }

+       if *telescopeFlag {
+           var urls []string
+           urls = parseFromTelescope()
+           if *jflag {
+
+               checkURLJson(urls)
+           } else {
+
+               fmt.Println()
+               fmt.Println(">>  ***** UrlChecker is working now...... *****  <<")
+               fmt.Println("--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------")
+               checkURL(urls)
+           }
+       }
+
        //use for loop to deal with multiple file paths
        i := 1
        for i+1 <= len(os.Args) {

            var urls []string
+
            if os.Args[i][0] != '-' {

                //call functions to check the availability of each url

I did not make a good end for Release 0.2

Isabella Liu — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 17:15:14 +0000

I was not good at open tasks. This October had been a little frustrating for me. The issues that I can find are either too easy or too hard for me to accomplish. For the last one, I found an issue that needs help with unit tests, the link is here. I was planning to work on this two weeks ago, but it was a little challenging for me, because it should be written in Golang, and I have little knowledge about unit test yet.

To be able to accomplish this issue, I read the whole tutorial of Golang unit testing and checked several simple examples as well. I thought I should be ready, and I went back to work on the issue, it was depressing that I cannot understand the purposes of most of the functions, and I have no idea where I should put my hands to begin. I contacted the owner asking for any useful advice, and he was kind to ask his colleagues for high-level guidance. I relied all my hope on this possible guidance, the sad thing is that guidance has never shown up since that colleague never responded.

I fell into slight depression and anxiety depression. Why did not I try to find new issues? I tried, just cannot find something satisfying, the hard ones are not for me to solve, and the easy ones seem not worth the time and energy, and more like the first PR thing rather than the last one.

I tried hard and I found this one https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup/issues/279. I started working on it and when I've almost done with it, the owner responded saying that this was assigned to someone else and hoping me to working on a different one... although they didn't start a conversation under the issue... So... I had to start working on another issue https://github.com/inlets/inletsctl/issues/81, and I made my PR https://github.com/inlets/inletsctl/pull/82, which is still waiting to be checked and merged.

Release 0.2.3

Isabella Liu — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 17:02:25 +0000

For the third issue of release 0.2, I found a simple one that requires an HTML page. The issue is here: https://github.com/consolelancer/portfolio-shala/issues/3
I checked and was sure I should be able to complete this, although it has been a long time since the last time that I wrote HTML.

The PR is here: https://github.com/consolelancer/portfolio-shala/pull/11.

git rebase

Isabella Liu — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 03:32:13 +0000

how to refactoring code using `git rebase`

I used my repo to practice git rebase. First, I created a new branch to do the changes.

git checkout -b refactoring master

Then I tried to find some improvement in my code. I found four improvements. After I finished each improvement:

git add .
git commit -m "message"

When I finish all my changes. I checked my commits with git log, add all the changes are in the log.

All the magic happens next step:

git rebase master -i

And I squash all other commits which I don't need to show on the log.

// change commit message.
git commit --ament

merge and push

git checkout master
git merge refactoring
git push origin master