This week was so busy I almost had no time to write any code.
I finally moved! From the smallish town of Newmarket, ON to the big city. Downtown Toronto is where I call home now and it's my first step to being a proper hipster web developer.
That second step, though, is actually writing the code I mean to. Fortunately, between moving furniture, various boxes full of books, and spend stupid amounts of money on stuff I frankly took for granted when I lived with my parents (miss you <3), I managed to write a small bit of code.
This week, the class of OSD600 was tasked with submitting a new feature for one of our classmates' projects. Luckily, since we all were working on the same level playing field, we didn't really have to work ourselves ragged writing code.
Truly, the challenge this week was familiarizing ourselves with how GitHub operates. How pull requests work, how to create and maintain branches, and what to do when our code gets feedback. More on that later.
So Tuesday evening, the night before the big move, I picked a classmate's repo, forked it, and went to work adding a feature.
danishalim
/
URLChecker
Bulk check URL status codes
URLChecker
Node.js command-line tool to bulk-check URL status codes
Installation
On your command line or git terminal
git clone https://github.com/danishalim/URLChecker
Open the directory and paste the following in the command line
npm install OR npm i
Type in the following to create a symlink
npm link
Usage:
Find and check URLs inside file:
urlcheck -f filename
Find and check URLS inside files and test them as https where they are https
urlcheck -f filename -s
Options:
Version information:
urlcheck -v
Help:
urlcheck or urlcheck -h
Features
- The script matches all URLs in a given file and bulk-checks their status codes
- Links with successful responses are printed in green, 400 and 404 status codes are printed in red; all others (unknown) are printed in grey.
- Code is optimized to only request headers.
- Test http links with https protocol
This went great! As I reviewed the week's lectures I packed and afterward wrote my snippet of code to test http links as https when using a certain argument. Everything was going great.
So I submitted my pull request and expected feedback within the day, or two days, or three, or the week. However, instead, I found none. Every day I checked to see if I missed anything, between buying amenities and moving furniture I checked. I was disheartened when it came to Friday and I had no response from the repo maintainer. Unfortunate. But I did learn something important.
Added support for http https conversion, added docs
#3
Adding this as an addendum to the issue I posted, added support for an argument allowing users to see links processed as https instead of http where applicable. Also updated the docs to reflect the new use case.
Please consider adding, thanks!
You're always gonna deal with rejection
If a user doesn't want you adding to their repo, they can just ignore you. Is this unfortunate? Yes. But like any other discipline in which you "put yourself out there", you're gonna be dealing with rejection from every angle. When I dip my toes into Hacktoberfest (yes I want the t-shirt), I know I have to do a great job not just coding, but communicating my intent through the pull requests I make and the forks I choose to work on.
So. I didn't get everything I wanted out of this week. But what I did get out of it was a valuable lesson that I'll take into Hacktoberfest: persevere in offering your services and if they're not interested, move on. But never stop working and learning.
Update
Looks like my pull request was received! How exciting, contributing to another's project. I'm completely floored by how cool the idea is and I really can't wait to contribute to more projects during Hacktoberfest.
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