Contributing to a Class Repo

Intro

One of the courses I previously took at Seneca, IPC144, is getting a major overhaul to their website, and through my open source class, I had the opportunity to contribute to this project. There was a huge meta issue with all the pages that needed to be updated and I decided to take on the task of auditing and fixing the arrays.md page.

Approaching the Task

If you take a look at the issue, there was quite a significant list of things to be completed. I first forked and cloned the issue, created a new branch for my issue (called issue-40) and started up the website to see how it looked. After this, I tackled the list one by one, checking off tasks as I completed them and creating commits for each one.

Some of the changes I made included:

• fixing typos
• adding intra-site links and adding descriptive text to links
• adding Frontmatter

---
id: arrays
title: "Arrays"
sidebar_position: 1
slug: /data-structures/arrays
description: "An array is a data structure consisting of an ordered set of elements of common type that are stored contiguously in memory."
---

• adding syntax highlighting
• fixing some HTML that was causing console errors

For example, in the HTML tables, there were no <thead> or <tbody> tags which caused the <tr> cannot appear as a child of <table> error and the columns were using colspan instead of colSpan.

I pushed all these changes to the issue-40 branch and created a pull request in the main repository.

Receiving Reviews

I received so many helpful reviews to my pull request. For example, the image on the page was difficult to see in dark mode and I had forgotten to add alt text. Two of my classmates, Tengzhen and Minsu pointed these out to me and Tengzhen suggested that I could save the image and add a white background so that the black text would still be visible on a black background.

This is what the image looked like before. As you can see, the circled text is barely visible in dark mode.

After the fix, it's clearer.

Jerry suggested that I could convert the tables to images since the tables didn't look great on all screen sizes and in his case, he needed to scroll to see the full table.

This is how a table looked for Jerry.

After the fix, all the tables are images and resize according to the page size.

Finally, Kien pointed out a typo as well as a broken link on the page.

Conclusion

Although I had checked over my work before creating the pull request, I guess the great thing about open source is even if you miss something, you can get a lot of great input from others and suggestions on how to make things even better. It was a bit overwhelming working on such a large meta issue because everyone had different ways of approaching the same tasks, but it was a great learning experience and made me very appreciative of working with an open source community.