After my last post on my running GitHub streak, I've pretty much continued to contribute to the same projects, so I didn't see much of a point of posting about it again — the fun part about these posts is talking about all the new projects I've started or joined. However, this time an arbitrary base-ten milestone comes rather close to another development on the GitHub side which is way more awesome than a streak; hence the post.
Firstly, a screenshot:
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| I wish there was more dark green |
Now, let's have a look at the commit that made the streak reach 200. That's right, it's a merge commit to Servo — something which is created for the collaborator who merges the pull request1. Which is a great segue into the second half of this post:
I now have commit/collaborator access to Servo. :D
It happened around a week back. Ms2ger needed a reviewer, Lars mentioned he wanted to get me more involved, I said I didn't mind reviewing, and in a few minutes I was reviewing a pull request for the first time. A while later I had push access.
This doesn't change my own workflow while contributing to Servo; since everyone still goes through pull requests and reviews. But it gives a much greater sense of belonging to a project. Which is saying something, since Mozilla projects already give one a sense of being "part of the team" rather early on, with the ability to attend meetings, take part in decision-making, and whatnot.
I also now get to review others' code, which is a rather interesting exercise. I haven't done much reviewing before. Pull requests to my own repos don't count much since they're not too frequent and if there are small issues I tend to just merge and fix. I do give feedback for patches on Firefox (mostly for the ones I mentor or if asked on IRC), but in this situation I'm not saying that the code is worthy to be merged; I'm just pointing out any issues and/or saying "Looks good to me".
With Servo, code I review and mark as OK is ready for merging. Which is a far bigger responsibility. I make mistakes (and style blunders) in my own code, so marking someone else's code as mistake free is a bit intimidating at first. Yes, everyone makes mistakes and yet we have code being reviewed properly, but right now I'm new to all this, so I'm allowed a little uncertainty ;) Hopefully in a few weeks I'll be able to review code without overthinking things too much.
In other GitHub-ish news, a freshman of my department submitted a very useful pull request to one of my repos. This makes me happy for multiple reasons: I have a special fondness for student programmers who are not from CS (not that I don't like CS students), being one myself. Such students face an extra set of challenges of finding a community, learning the hard stuff without a professor, and juggling their hobby with normal coursework (though to be fair for most CS students their hobby programming rarely intersects with coursework either).
Additionally, the culture of improving tools that you use is one that should be spread, and it's great that at least one of the new students is a part of this culture. Finally, it means that people use my code enough to want to add more features to it :)
1. I probably won't count this as part of my streak and make more commits later today. Reviewing is hard, but it doesn't exactly take the place of writing actual code so I may not count merge commits as part of my personal commit streak rules.
I now have commit/collaborator access to Servo. :D
It happened around a week back. Ms2ger needed a reviewer, Lars mentioned he wanted to get me more involved, I said I didn't mind reviewing, and in a few minutes I was reviewing a pull request for the first time. A while later I had push access.
This doesn't change my own workflow while contributing to Servo; since everyone still goes through pull requests and reviews. But it gives a much greater sense of belonging to a project. Which is saying something, since Mozilla projects already give one a sense of being "part of the team" rather early on, with the ability to attend meetings, take part in decision-making, and whatnot.
I also now get to review others' code, which is a rather interesting exercise. I haven't done much reviewing before. Pull requests to my own repos don't count much since they're not too frequent and if there are small issues I tend to just merge and fix. I do give feedback for patches on Firefox (mostly for the ones I mentor or if asked on IRC), but in this situation I'm not saying that the code is worthy to be merged; I'm just pointing out any issues and/or saying "Looks good to me".
With Servo, code I review and mark as OK is ready for merging. Which is a far bigger responsibility. I make mistakes (and style blunders) in my own code, so marking someone else's code as mistake free is a bit intimidating at first. Yes, everyone makes mistakes and yet we have code being reviewed properly, but right now I'm new to all this, so I'm allowed a little uncertainty ;) Hopefully in a few weeks I'll be able to review code without overthinking things too much.
In other GitHub-ish news, a freshman of my department submitted a very useful pull request to one of my repos. This makes me happy for multiple reasons: I have a special fondness for student programmers who are not from CS (not that I don't like CS students), being one myself. Such students face an extra set of challenges of finding a community, learning the hard stuff without a professor, and juggling their hobby with normal coursework (though to be fair for most CS students their hobby programming rarely intersects with coursework either).
Additionally, the culture of improving tools that you use is one that should be spread, and it's great that at least one of the new students is a part of this culture. Finally, it means that people use my code enough to want to add more features to it :)
1. I probably won't count this as part of my streak and make more commits later today. Reviewing is hard, but it doesn't exactly take the place of writing actual code so I may not count merge commits as part of my personal commit streak rules.
