Hello all! This is my final Hacktoberfest devlog for 2024.
To get more context with regards to this devlog, please see my other devlogs below:
In this final week of Hacktoberfest 2024, I wanted to challenge myself by contributing to larger open source projects. Specifically, I wanted to provide a pull request that involves a fix or a feature that is larger than just fixing a spelling mistake.
At the time of writing, I have made several pull requests, none of which have currently been merged or seen yet by the maintainers.
The work I did this week fell into several categories:
- logging new issues for projects
- requesting information on how to get started with an issue I logged, or requesting advice on fixing an existing issue
- creating pull requests for issues that I felt like I had enough information to make an attempt
1. Logging new issues for projects
All the issues I worked on this week were related to Visual Studio Code extensions, since Visual Studio Code is my text-editor of choice.
One of the extensions that I use makes working with markdown easier. This extension is called, Markdown All in One on VSCode, but the is known as vscode-markdown on GitHub.
Markdown All in One has a feature I really like, which is to convert markdown into HTML, but I noticed that I was having an issue where the conversion wasn't working how it used to.
It turns out that because I had another extension called, Markdown Preview Mermaid Support in Visual Studio Code enabled vscode-markdown-mermaid, I was unable to use the Markdown All In One's feature properly
To that end, I logged 2 issues:
- One for Markdown All In One
- Another for Markdown Preview Mermaid Support
While I have yet to hear back from Markdown All In One from the time of writing, I was able to get a quick response from the maintainer of Markdown Preview Mermaid Support that this issue would not be investigated further because as of right now, the Markdown Preview Mermaid Support is only built to support the base Visual Studio Code settings.
So despite doing my best to log an issue and reproduce the problem, I was not able to gain enough information as of yet to contribute further to resolving this issue.
2. Requesting information on how to get started with an issue I logged or on an existing issue
My next step was trying to find existing issues on projects that I was interested in. I wanted to follow-up on an issue logged for Plasmo, a framework which is a framework for building browser extensions using React and TypeScript.
I found this issue, which had the issue of good first issue. I had no idea how to work on this issue at all, but I wanted to make an attempt to at least set up my development environment so I went straight to Plasmo's guide on how to contribute.
I found a small grammatical mistake which I thought I could fix quickly as I was tackling the main issue, so I raised an issue and made a pull request to fix the issue.
I didn't get a response for my pull request that fixes the grammatical mistake, or any word on how to tackle the original issue in question, but hope to soon.
3. Creating some pull requests when I had enough information to work off of
Because of how hard it was for me to find an issue that I could actually contribute to, I reached out to my Professor for some guidance. He was able to find this issue for a Visual Studio Code extension that I use every day - a spell checker. In Visual Studio Code, the extension is known as Code Spell Checker, and on GitHub, the repository is called,
vscode-spell-checker.
After taking the time to sit with the code and go through some of the commit history, I was able to find another pull request that contained a solution that I think was essentially what I needed to do in my very own pull request.
As such, I studied the changes made in that pull request, and made my own pull request which references the fix from the other pull request.
And with that, I had finally made a contribution that in my mind, met the requirements that I was trying to meet, which was to contribute to a large open-source project and contribute something other than a fix for a simple spelling mistake.
While this pull request still hasn't been processed by a maintainer, I am hopeful that the fix will go well, given that I more or less followed the example from one of the maintainer's commits.
With all of this said - I want to conclude this series of devlogs for Hactkoberfest 2024.
It was a great experience working on small, medium, and large sized projects. I feel like I've gained a little bit more mastery over git and GitHub, and know how to use these tools to my advantage now. In addition, I feel a lot more comfortable searching for solutions and reading code, by virtue of viewing all sorts of different open source repositories.
My immediate hope is to get some feedback from the maintainers for the different issues/pull requests I currently made, but my long-term hope is that in the near future, I can work more closely with a repository of my choosing, and make important and vital changes/improvements that will better the repository and help its community of users.
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