The 3 Things I Learned

Hello people, So it’s been a week and as promised, I’m going to tell you about my experience in coala. Which is an open-source community. I will specifically tell you about my journey, and probably everything that happened to me in the first two weeks.

What coala is about?

coala written with small c, stands for “COde AnaLysis Application”. As it’s name suggests, coala is a static code analysis software that empowers developers to create rules which a project’s code should conform to. coala takes care of showing these issues to users in a friendly manner, is versatile and can be used in any environment. It also show’s Patches in a friendly manner which can fix your code according to the specified rules.

Why I chose coala for open-source contribution?

The answer is very simple, it’s written in python. And out of the blue box this project came to me while I was surfing on the Internet.

About my first 2 weeks after joining the community.

So, we have a newcomers guide, which every newcomer has to follow. The very first step in the guide was to introduce yourself on the gitter channel. We have a secret code-word for all newcomers, “Hello World”. So I just pinged on the channel and soon I got an invitation to the organisation. The guide is very helpful towards newcomers. It’s a complete guide which will land you to get your first Pull Request(PR) merged. The newcomers issues are very simple. Can vary from correcting a typo, removing a line or fixing some simple stuff.

This community has a workflow that on each issue only an individual who is assigned to it, can work for it. So my first task was to get myself assigned to a newcomer’s issue. Well in coala most of the things are automated. So, for issue assignment we have a gitter cobot (coala bot) with which you can easily assign yourself to any issue with a single command. Soon after I got myself assigned to one, I started working on my first patch. It was about removing deprecated <center> tags from their “projects” website. Well that was pretty easy isn’t it? Yes, so I finished making my PR in about 10-15 mins. Just Wait a sec! the work doesn’t get’s over yet!!. We have some specific rules before a PR is merged into the code-base. After submitting your PR you have to wait for a review from any existing member of a community. Which I feel is the best thing in this community, anyone can review anyone’s PR. By reviewing we can even learn more about someone’s work. This even embraces our own coding knowledge. I totally love reviewing other’s work by this you can actually learn more about coding style. So, soon my pending PR got reviewed and BAAM! in 2 days my first patch got merged into coala’s code-base.

After this I took 2-3 more issues. And on the end of my second week I got promoted to a core-dev @coala.

Thanks to all the maintainer’s and my fellow dev’s @coala. Special Thanks to @sils,@Makman2,@jayvdb,@SanketDG and @mixih for giving me an initial boost.

The 3 Things I Learned

1. The first and the most exciting thing I learned after joining coala was, getting to know people and about their work. It’s really fascinating how much these people invest their time in open-source project. And at last it’s all worth it. Every single bit of it. I can actually tell you that, after experiencing it myself. The feel about how your work can make a difference in million’s of peoples lives, is enough to get yourself motivated.
2. Second thing I learned was, whenever you got yourself stuck at some point while working on an issue. Don’t directly ask for it in the channel without doing some prior research on it. In my opinion this actually wastes a lot of time even for you and also for the person who is answering it. Doing some prior research can actually help you to support your case well, you can elaborate the cause well by saying that, “I have tried these all things but still this isn’t working for me”.
3. Third and the last thing which I learned was about reviewing. Doing patches solving issues, isn’t the only way to contribute in an organisation. Reviewing is also one of the most important aspect. By reviewing you can actually learn about how a code can be written in more than one way. Sometimes, you can even get you hands on small tricks, when applied can actually make your code much more efficient than before.

So, this was all about my first few weeks experience in coala. For more, Stay Tuned! And Start Contributing :)

Written on March 7th, 2017 by Saurav Singh