My Hacktoberfest 2020 experience day 1

My Hacktoberfest 2020 experience

Day 1 October 1st:

I started off by finding my first issue, after 30 minutes of finding a suitable issue I can get my teeth stuck into. I found a repository which was a Go lang wrapper library for a payment API called Mollie-API. The issue I choose was for Creating code samples for a part of the library which handled website profiles in the API.

Firstly, I started by reading the repository README file to get an idea of what the repository is about then I went to look through the API documentation to get a better understanding of the API, mainly looking through the profiles section. After 10 minutes of reading, by then I felt confident I could complete this task. I went back to Github, I forked the repository and commented on the issue saying I would like to do this task.

While waiting for a reply, I set up my prefered code editor which was Visual studio code and then I cloned the repository. I was confident I would get this task as it was tagged with ‘Hacktoberfest’ and no one was assigned to the issue. On the README it said that in order to use the API I needed a Mollie account, so I headed over to the Mollie API site and created an account then I took a break for a bit.

After taking some time away from my laptop, I got a reply to my comment to give me the green light with completing the task. So with the green light, I went straight to Visual studio code and started coding, during my break I had thought some ideas about how I was going to complete this task.

I coded one code example which was for creating a profile, at this point, everything was going well until I hit a brick wall, after running the code sample I got an HTTP error, from that I knew it sent a request but the mollie server didn’t like what I sent. I was confused at first, I couldn’t put a finger on the problem, I tried running the code sample again, no luck 😢.

I decided to try a different code sample, the code sample I tried next was a sample for getting a profile, I coded the example, ran it and … No luck again with a similar response. Again I tried a different sample, this time being a sample for getting the current profile belonging to the API key. I coded it, ran it and to my surprise, it worked! HAZAR! It’s great that it works but the other code examples don’t.

So, I went to the API documentation and looked at API reference for the code samples I created I found out that the samples that were not working require an app access token, not an API key. I created an access token and changed the code to work with an access token and BOOM! it works 😎.

I created a few more code samples before I decided to finish for the day. Tomorrow, I will hope to finish the remaining code samples.