The Bullet I Bit

I was scared and intimidated by looking through GitHub for other issues after my experience with Rico. But I needed to get over that fear. The next issue that I chose was with OpenRefine. It’s a tool that allows you to work with data and augment it with data from the web. This was also a large project much like Rico. The issue seemed simple enough. It was a matter of cleaning up the code and fixing the return string from a function. I also had difficulty getting the project to run on my machine, though my IDE showed that the build was successful so I assumed that all was well. The fix itself seemed simple so I just performed my changes and submitted the pull request. However, it failed the build test and I had to go back and review the changes. With this project, I received prompt responses that helped me to interpret what the errors were along with some helpful comments. I looked over the project once again and tried once more to get it to build. However, the build was showing up as successful though the IDE gave me some errors. This confused me for a while. It turns out that this project in contrast to the previous one that I had taken part in uses Maven rather than Gradle and therefore required some extra steps. I had never worked with Maven before so I had some trepidation. I was desperately hoping that it wouldn’t end up like my experience with Rico. However, everything went smoothly to my relief. Once I’d gotten everything working, I made the necessary changes. With this project, I had to look up the differences between instanceof and isInstance in java. This was considerably simpler compared to the first issue that I worked on and went by a bit more smoothly. Part of this could be attributed to their extensive documentation that made everything infinitely easier. All throughout the hunt for issues, I found projects that were severely lacking in documentation. These were a bit discouraging to work on due to the lack of reference. I am beginning to appreciate good documentation more and more over these few weeks.