Outreachy Week 6 – Week 7: Getting Code Merge

Already half way through the internship! I have implemented some features and opened a merge request. So… what now? Let’s get those changes merged once and for all! Since I’m already at mid-point, there’s also a video shared on what I’ve done so far in this project.

• Breaking large merge request into smaller pieces
• Thoughts on remote pair programming
• Video sharing for the current progress with the project

Making that video was probably the most time-consuming part. Paying great respects to all YouTubers out there!

Breaking The Merge Request

When I looked back at my merge request, it actually started out quite small and precise. After discussions in the merge request, I started to fix things in the same merge request and then it just got bigger and bigger and we had to seperate out the “mergable parts” to make actual progress in this project.

Remote Pair Programming

You can’t overhear what others are doing or learn something about your colleagues through gossip over lunch break when working remotely. So after being stuck for quite a bit, terceiro suggested that we try pair programming.

After our first remote pair programming session, I think there should be no difference in pair programming in person. We shared the same terminal, looked at the same code and discussed just like people standing side by side.

Through our pair programming session, I found out that I had a bad habit. I didn’t run tests on my code that often, so when I had failing tests that didn’t fail before, I spent more time debugging than I should have. Pair programming gave insight to how others work and I think little improvements go a long way.

Week 6

• extract test job creation code got merged (https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/debci/merge_requests/87)
• authentication code got merged (https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/debci/merge_requests/88)

And then I took almost a week off, so my week 7 was delayed.

Week 7

I found out that I can make small merge requests and list the merge requests it depends on. Gitlab will automatically handle the rest for me once a request is merged.

• finally finished breaking down my large merge request
• added the history section