Collaborative Editing

This particular task has been exhausting. I quickly realized how terrible I am when it comes to following instructions. Will this jeopardize my fervent wish to contribute to open source in the future? Je ne sais pas. Regardless, there is no going back now.

My contributions

I made my allotted changes to Francis and Jimmyzs’s repositories. I sifted through all the grammar and tried my best to fix certain sentence structures. My experience as a grammar elitist may have come in handy during this but I tried my best to be cordial when making suggestions. However, my untrained eyes have, undoubtedly, skipped an error here and there. I made multiple commits and submitted a pull request to each of their repositories after adding them and pushing them on to my fork.

Accepting incoming changes

Trouble came in the form of accepting the changes Francis and Jimmy made to my own repository. They maintained the same workflow I did and diligently so. As I quickly figured out, accepting incoming changes is harder (at least, at this point) than sending changes. My respect for repository maintainers grew linearly as I spent hours trying to fix an accidental merge from Jimmy. See, the instruction was to accept the incoming changes to a new branch instead of merging them into master. After realizing what I had done, I quickly reverted the change using a revert commit only to realize that once a pull request is accepted, it is banished into the nether forever and I would not be able to create a new branch with the pull request again, since it has been closed. I could, however, easily set up a new branch that would point to the merge commit and branch out from master but that felt like superfluous workflow and I reverted the revert commit and created a new commit. Equipped with this experience, I accordingly took Francis’s pull request into account… or did I? I found out that Francis had already deleted his fork of my repo and the commits were now simply dangling changes, reminiscent of great contributions from him. With a heavy heart, I deleted the temporary branch and sighed at my failure to follow instructions.

Redemption

Chance came in the form of a similar assignment. Stay tuned.

Note: All the workflow is a direct result of this assignment from Stewart Weiss.