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One last pull request

Its nearing the end of the term, so that means its time to start submitting final projects and preparing for exams. For release 0.4, we were given the same task as before, contribute to one external project and also contribute to our Telescope project. For the Telescope project i was assigned Issue #255 , which required me to find a way to silence all the logs while the application is going through all the automated tests. Every time the application is run or built, all the tests run automatically and print out the results to the console. There are tons and tons of tests that run, to test every aspect of the application. Every time a part of a test is run, there may be some messages printed out on the console, giving information on whats happening or if there are any errors. The problem is, when all there tests are run one after another, theres hundreds of messages that show up on the console and it may get very distracting and make it harder to read the test results. For our applica
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Contributing to larger projects

As we progress through this semester, so does the level at which we contribute on github. For release 0.3 we were asked to contribute to 2 large projects, one of them being our internal Telescope project and the other one we were free to pick anything  we'd like. For the internal telescope project, i was assigned Issue #108 , and i was required to update some of the already existing code. The function i'm working with receives a URL string out of a queue and we use that URL to extract any information that we need. The URL is a link to a users blog posts. Currently the function just prints out the results, which is not very useful, so we need to change a few lines of code so that other modules of the Telescope project can use this function. The idea is to check every URL and extract all the useful information like the author, blog title, blog body and the time stamp of when it was posted and so on. Then we use this information to construct a "post" object that we can
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Hacktoberfest is officalially over

Hacktoberfest is now officially over, but i'm not sure if i should be happy or sad. Im glad that its over because it means i can finally stop trying to rush through PR's to have them submitted on time, but i'm also a bit sad that its over because it was a lot of fun and i learned a lot. During the month of October, we were required to submit 4 pull requests in order to qualify to win a free Hacktoberfest T-shirt. I think for the month of October i had 5 or 6 in total, 2 of them being genuine PR's for some of my other classes. Although we had learned how to create and submit PR's in class, it was definitely not the same when your'e submitting to other developer. For some reason it seemed a little more real, or maybe it just seemed like you had more on the line vs when your'e doing practice PR's in class. When i was first starting off, it was a lot scarier submitting my first PR, because i was afraid of messing something up. For example if you do somet
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Finding issues by accident

With Hacktoberfest almost over, it's time to submit the last pull request to qualify for the prize. Thats easier said than done because as the final submission day gets closer, the harder it is to make a meaningful pull request with such short time constraints. After searching for about 3 hours trying to find an open issue that i could handle within the given time, i realized that i might have been better off just choosing one of the simpler ones and actually finishing it.  In search for the "perfect" issue, i had cloned multiple repos in hopes that i could get one of them working so i could start trying to replicate the issue and fixing it. One of the repos that i cloned was for an iPhones application, for the popular card game, "Cards Against Humanity". As i was fiddling around with the app, i noticed that some of the text would not show up on my phone but worked fine when the app was running on a simulator on my computer. As much as i hate to admit this, i
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Pull Requests continued

As promised from last week, i'm submitting a second PR to the same repo as last week. In my last weeks blog post which you can find here , i was talking about contributing to a repo for a simple web based board game. Last weeks task was easy. All i had todo was find a way to save the state of the game so it can be loaded later. That was the easy part, now i have to load that data from the users machine and find a way to actually load the game exactly where the user left off. The difficult part of this weeks task is not loading the data, but actually loading the game so that it's exactly where the user left off when they saved. First i started off by actually accessing indexedDB to retrieve the game state from the users machine which was pretty simple after reading some of googles documentation. I had to load the data in such a manner that if something went wrong, or there was just no game states saved, the user would be notified. I also used this time to write a little extra
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Stepping up the PR game

It the second week of October, and that means it's time to submit another Pull Request for hacktoberfest. This time i wanted a bit more of a challenge than my previous PR  that was just fixing a small UI constraint issue. I decided to search GitHub for an issue that involved me getting more into the code, but also something that i could start and finish within a reasonable time. After about an hour of research, i found a very old repo that hadn't been updated in 11 years. The repo was for a very simple online version of the board game Go. I looked through the submitted issues and found that someone had posted an issue that they wanted a feature that would allow them to save the game progress. This seemed like the perfect issue for me to work on because its a very simple game that i could understand and more importantly, i could understand the code. So i forked the repo and cloned it to my local machine and got to work. First i started by running the game locally and playing
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Fixing Issiues

Now that Hacktoberfest has started, it's time for everyone to pitch in to the open source community and help other programmers. Because this is the first "official" time that i'm going to be making a real pull request to other developers online, i thought id pick an open issue that i know i would be able to handle in a timely manner. I chose an iOS application because thats just what i'm most familiar with, and have the most experience with. The issue i chose was just a simple constraint issue with some elements on the UI of the application, that i'll be going over with now. After successfully forking the project and cloning it to my local machine, i started to play with the application to try and duplicate the issue. Right from the beginning i started having issues because this application required me to have an account to use the app, or i would need to create an account using faceBook, which i don't have. So i started digging into the code to try and
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