Adventures in Pull Requesting
Do you know what a quiet breakdown is?
Neither did I, before doing this pull request for gulp.
Seems innocuous right? A simple package.json change. Someone put “tags” instead of “keywords”.
Well.
It’s already intimidating enough after watching my classmates get a variety of answers to their PRs ranging from “thx” to “Aren’t keywords mostly terms that are not part of the name and the description that are still relevant for a package. I think, the main goal is asdfghjk…. *request closed*”
So imagine my humiliation when:
- I decide to fork their repository
- Open a pull request
- Proceed to not adjust the location of the repo I want to actually fix
- Nervously type out my message for like 30 minutes
- Do the request
- See all the tests pass
- See that I can now merge to the master (my changes were accepted!!!11!one)
- Feel super happy that I am a master pull requester
…Just to find out that I pull requested my personal repository and that it was me who accepted the pull request.
And I’m not going to lie, I had a similar scare when I was setting up this blog using Jekyll Bootstrap. For some reason when I’d look at the github contributions to the project, I’d be in shock that I’ve contributed almost as much as the original creator. But when I’d look at the actual Jekyll repo and not my repo, I wouldn’t find myself in the contributor section.
So yeah. Minor internal breakdown.
The silver lining in all of this, though, was the speed at which my actual pull request to the actual repo was accepted.
It was accepted in 35 minutes.
With this comment:
"Weird, don't know how that happened. Thanks!"
I GOT A THANK YOU!
This has dispelled one of my worries that the moment I start contributing online, I would immediately be shut down. Obviously this is the reality working and contributing to projects online.
But that first friendly interaction from a stranger whose repo I contributed to was a great welcome to the Open Source world.
Thanks Contra!
