Taking on new technology

In my last week's blog, I talked about the two objectives I would take on during November. In the middle of working on the contributions, I decided to change my issue for the internal open source project. I'm hoping to continue with this issue for next pull request I have to submit for my course.

As you know, the external open source project I chose to contribute to was vscode. In the beginning, when i saw this issue, i thought this would be an uncomplicated and straightforward issue to work on within a big open source project. Before i forked the clown, i took a good look at the documents they had to just get a sense of how to contribute to the project and do the simple tasks of running and testing. After cloning, i had an issue running the project, this is where i spent some good time reading the documentation again, but i was just having a hard time running the project. I managed to get it running after a few reads. Thanks to another contributor i had a hint of where to start the implementation of the issue. When i opened the code base i was overwhelmed with all files and lines of code. I spent a few hours trying to understand what was going on. With suggestions from other contributors, i made the changes. But i wasn't fully done, i had to apply a background color to the feature i was implementing and again i couldn't figure it out for a long time. After a few days of researching and trying to figure out a way, i asked for help from a contributor. I was directed to a way of doing the background color and i tested around to see what would be the best. After some trial and error of the colors, i figured i would just implement a way i think was better than what was suggested. I created this pull request and am waiting for feedback on how i did the implementation. Overall this wasn't like what i had expected. I found it very difficult to implement the feature and getting a grasp of the code.

For the internal open source project, i decided to help another classmate with their feature. The issue was raised by the developer of the feature and he needed help writing the testing part of his feature so i decided to help him. For the telescope project, it was decided that jest would be the technology used for writing the testing portion. Personally, i had never heard or worked with jest so it was a good experience and exposure to something new. With the help of the developer and reading the docs, i was able to write two test cases to test the functionality of the feature. After raising this pull request, i had classmates review the code. One classmate suggested a change to my code which i agreed to and i definitely did miss.