Contributing to Open Source : Week 5

Alejandra Bricio

Dec 29, 2020·2 min read

(This story is part of the weekly assignments for my internship at Nearsoft. I hope that some of the insights I learned this week can help others in their learning journey.)

Issues and pull requests

This week, I worked on two issues:

  ╔═══════════╦═══════════════════════════════════╦═══════════════╗
  ║  project  ║               issue               ║    status     ║
  ╠═══════════╬═══════════════════════════════════╬═══════════════╣
  ║   smug    ║ Add `create` and `edit` commands  ║    Doing      ║
  ║ open-desk ║    New Site UI calling backend    ║    Merged     ║
  ╚═══════════╩═══════════════════════════════════╩═══════════════╝

How I was trying to contribute

For the open-desk issue (Javascript + React), I had to connect the UI to the backend by calling the /site endpoint with the following request:

{
  "orgId": "string",
  "id": "string",
  "name": "string",
  "location": "string",
  "floors": [
    {
      "floorId": "string",
      "name": "string",
      "openDesk": "string",
      "reservedDesk": "string"
    }
  ]
}

For the smug issue (Go), I had to add the ability to create and edit configuration files within smug command.

For example, smug <edit|create> <project> should open ~/.config/smug/project.yml in the $EDITOR.

Any positive or negative results

For the open-desk issue (Javascript + React), I successfully connected the UI with the backend and received a successful response from the API. The most difficult part was to work on the logic for the input of the dynamically added <Add Floor/> component.

To solve this, I used the onBlur event in the input button, which would trigger a function to update the floor array as follows:

const onBlurFloor = (e, id) => {
        console.log(floor)
        if (floor.length > id) {
            floor[id].name = e.target.value
        }
        else {
            if (e.target.value != '') {
                floor.push({
                    name: e.target.value
                })
            }
        }
    }

For the smug issue (Go), I created the Edit function which gets the full executable path for the editor and opens it.

func (smug Smug) Edit(filename string) error {
    editor := os.Getenv("EDITOR")
    if editor == "" {
        editor = "vim"
    }
    executable, err := exec.LookPath(editor)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    cmd := exec.Command(executable, filename)
    cmd.Stdin = os.Stdin
    cmd.Stdout = os.Stdout
    cmd.Stderr = os.Stderr
    return cmd.Run()
}

However, I still need to pass the filename argument into the function in order to edit or create a new file if it doesn’t exist. Also, I need to create the tests for the function and implement the error handling.

What did I learn this week?

A lot! 🙂 I learned about Error Handling and Go. I also started to study Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Y. Bhargava in order to review Data Structures and Algorithms. Last, I learned about SOLID Principles.

In Javascript, Error Handling looks like this:

try {
    firstFunction();
    secondFunction();
    thirdFunction();
} catch (e) {
    console.error(e);
}

However, in Go it looks like this:

func Open(name string) (file *File, err error){
    f, err := os.Open("filename.ext")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    // do something with the open *File f
}