kheppenstall

Open Source Contribution Write-Up

Picking a Project

Coming into picking a project to contribute to I was not picky and just wanted to contribute to a project I had used. This led me to look through the gemfile on some of my previous Rails projects and checking out the gemfile. Since I'm most comfortable writing and reading code in Ruby, gems seemed like the right place to start looking for open source projects for contributing. I looked through my gemfile and picked three of my favorite gems, rspec-rails, shoulda-matchers, and faraday. After reviewing some of the criteria spelled out in the Turing guidelines, I picked up a few more important considerations. I started looking at how recently the code had been updated, size of the project, clarity of the contributing.md, and conversations happening

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Hi instructor team. Thanks for taking a look at my pitches. These are in order of preference.

Shoulda Matchers Gem

• Why: I use shoulda matchers all the time, there is a great contributing.md, and lots of open issues up that look accessible. I also really like thoughtbot.
• What: This issue fixing a misleading message might be a great place to get started.
• I need: To get the development environment setup locally and start diving into one of the issues.
• When I'm done: I will submit some PRs and hopefully get some feedback on them and get them in there!

Pivotal Tracker Gem

• Why: I worked on this already with Jason Noble and feel like I can jump right in and get to work and will probably get my PRs merged in. Also it is interesting to write an activerecord like wrapper and is great practice with APIs.

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M4 Reflection

Fork this gist and answer these questions to reflect on your learning experiences.

• What brought you to Turing?

I needed a career change. I burned out of teaching and felt the balance between the cognitive and emotional workload was not enough for me. I wanted to switch from teaching problem-solving to doing problem-solving. I also wanted a better balance in my life to pursue the things I am passionate about outside of work.

• Where do you see yourself after Turing?

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Kyle Heppenstall Module 4 Action Plan

Module 4 Goals

• Job offer by last day of module 4
• 3 interviews in module
• 1 coffee meeting per week
• 5 cold or warm outreach emails per week (associated with job application or not)

Strategy To Achieve Goals:

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TrailSourcing

Pitch

This is an application that gives trail users and trail maintainers one platform on which to log and prioritize trail work requests/issues.

Problem

We're trying to crowdsource identifying and prioritizing trailwork. Right now trail users do not have an easy way to communicate trailwork requests or 'upvote' trailwork requests in the works. People often complain about the state of trails but do not do anything to communicate concerns or work on the trails themselves. Part of the reason is also that it is often very cumbersome to submit a trail work request or report on an issue.

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Flower Exercise

My Favorite People To Work With

• People that like to investigate and solve problems.
• People that like are mechanical or athletic.
• People that put a focus on learning.
• People that take initiative.
• People that can work collaboratively and independently.

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In both Bike Share and Little Shop my team used Waffle as a project management tool. In Bike Share I was the project manager from my team. Our workflow was effective using Waffle and Github but unfortunately I was the only person managing cards. In Little Shop I shared that with my team and we were all diligent in moving cards and tagging the cards with in our pull requests to better marry Github and Waffle.

One piece of feedback from Bike Share was that pull requests were getting merged too quickly without all team members having the opportunity to review. As a result during Little Shop all pull requests were tagged with the number of reviewers needed. For small items like styling the author would recommend one review but for larger features and signficant routing / ruby the pull request would be tagged as needing all team members to review. Furthermore, we dug into the Github review feature to do a line-by-line review of code - specifying what we liked about the code and giving suggestions. Then the author

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How to start a new project

ActiveRecord with RSpec

rails new my_project -T --database=postgresql --skip-turbolinks --skip-spring

group :development, :test do
  gem 'rspec-rails', '~> 3.5'

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Group Expectations

Group Member Names: Josh, Drew, Kyle

Project Manager: Kyle

Defining the Relationship (DTR) Questions:

1. When are group members available to work together? What hours can each group member work individually? Are there any personal time commitments that need to be discussed?

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1. What was a opportunity for improvement in your group?

Molly and I started off not too well but progressed over the course of the project. Our main opportunity for improvement was starting the project on the same page during the first week. I took off way too fast on the project, and as a result Molly felt behind and stressed our during the first week. It may have been wise to start off coding on an exercism or something else so we familiarized each other with our different strengths / weaknesses with ruby. Luckily we slowed down a bit and ended up on the same page during the second week. Once we were on the same page with work style and speed then we were much more productive together and both people learned more.

2. What was your role?

I kept the big picture in mind during the project and held the vision / task schedule. I often initiated the tasks that we completed together. I also focused more on the analysis parts of the project than the molly since I enjoyed doing the math / calculations.

3. What