This week I continue my path of working with Open Source projects. For this specific, I worked with an issue in a repository called GoodFirstIssue. In this essay, I will explain this week’s learnings.
Issues and pull requests
For this week I worked on issue I personally open, this issue is in a repository called Good First Issue. This is a website that filters repositories to find good first issues for beginners. Good First Issues empowers first-time contributors of open-source software. This website is primarily targeted at developers who want to contribute to open-source software but do not know where or how to start.
I used this particular webpage at the begging of the phase to know where or how to start in the Open Source community. And a problem I encounter is that many of these first good issues that we can found on the webpage are not in “popular” repositories. So it was harder to find one that suits some personal requirements. The solution for this is that we could see the stars and/or forks the GitHub repositories have, so we can do a mental filter.
How I was trying to contribute
So I decided to give a little feature to this particular webpage by creating an issue that will help future contributors by viewing projects to contribute and see the stars of these.
By achieving I started looking at how the Good First Issue project handles calls to the API of GitHub, and implement this new feature in the calls of the project by displaying the stars of the projects.
Positive or negative results
One of the positive results of starting working with this issue is that I learned to read other people’s code a little bit more. As well as how a vanilla JavaScript project works.
A negative result is that I am not used to working on vanilla JavaScript so some concepts were kinda tricky to grasp. The outcome is that I need to practice a bit more of the DOM concepts and core concepts. Something that I am now working on.
What did I learn this week?
A lot of things were learned this week because I encounter GraphQL to use the API of Github. One topic I found out it was really interesting, hopefully, I will dive into it a little bit more.
Another special thing I learned is a little about the Go language because I needed to use it for the project to handle API calls.
The pull request has not been made, hopefully, very soon this can be implemented in the Good First Issue web page so more future people who want to contribute to Open Source can find this feature useful.
