I Open-Sourced A Project!

Ok so that title’s a bit misleading…technically everything I’ve put on GitHub is open source I guess 😋 But yesterday I added some files to the repo of the value app to make it contributor-friendly and this morning I got my first pull request!

Prepping the Repo

Aside from adding the files I wrote about the other day, I had to make some other updates to the repo as well. The main one (and a step I nearly missed) was updating the node packages. I had done some a few weeks ago but others had gone out of date again. May as well get things totally up to date before other people start working on it.

I also had to rethink how I was working with the branches. I had been using a development branch to work on, while deployments were coming from the master branch. I know this is good practice, but with just me contributing it ended up being more hassle than helpful 😂 Also while I’m still learning how to maintain a project with other people contributing, I’m not really sure how to instruct people to make pull requests to the dev branch? I tried setting development up as the default branch, but then that didn’t seem to make much sense either. So in the end I changed it back to master, deleted development, and created a new branch heroku which now triggers Heroku to build and deploy the site (instead of changes to master). I’m not 100% sure this is best practice but it’ll do for now. We’ll see how it goes.

First Contribution

The first contribution I got was for a bug that’s been in the app for a while. Turned out to be a simple function invocation I forgot to add when I first created the function. I don’t know how I overlooked that! So already super awesome to have another set of eyes on it 😂

Other Things To Consider

Maybe I should add a linter to the project? It’s something I didn’t really think about before—I’m the only one working on it so the syntax style is pretty consistent (hopefully!). But with multiple people working on it, it probably couldn’t hurt to include. Something to work on.

Another thing is putting it out there for people to actually discover the project so that they can contribute. The repo and issue tags are a start, and things like Hacktoberfest and 24 Pull Requests will help too. But I think I’ll add it to a few more places…one recommendation was the Dev.to community’s open source thread so that’s where I’ll start!

Other Stuff

I started working on templatizing my personal site so that I can add posts and content more easily in the future. I started with both Hexo and Hugo and will test setting up the Netlify CMS both ways to see which works better. So eventually it will be great! But wow, didn’t realize how much it’s going to take to break apart all those static pages I created, yikes 😁

Funny how I am suddenly working on all of these icebox projects when I really should get working on the big project!

Up Next

Lots of fun options. Feels great 😄