Last week I received my first pull request to a project on GitHub. This post is about my thoughts on the experience.

The pull request was for hubot-lmgtfy; a hubot script. I wrote the script around 2 years ago, while I was contributing to the Mozilla Web QA team. I published it to GitHub and npm at the time. I have not touched it since then and have not kept track of its stats on npm.

So, my first reaction was one of surprise. It is a rather silly script, so I did not expect anyone used it. Next, I felt happy that someone out there uses it and wants it updated for hubot version 3. My next thought was ‘oh-no!’. I need to review changes to code I have not looked at in a long time. Plus I have not worked with hubot/coffeescript/javascript since then.

Fortunately, I blogged at the time about hubot and scripting. I also had a unit test as well. So, I was able to refresh my knowledge quickly. It took about a week from the initial submission of the pull request to when I had the new version published on npm. The week was not total time worked on it though. The total time was a few hours spread over the week.

Some thoughts on the process:

• Contributing to open source leads to opportunities I would not have otherwise. In this case, it started with contributing to the Mozilla WebQA team. I had the opportunity to work with hubot. That event led to this first pull request. These may be small projects; but, the topics were new to me and were a good experience.

• I was glad I blogged about my work as it made catching up easier. Things have changed since I first wrote the blog posts, but it gave me a place to start from. I sometimes wonder if it is worthwhile blogging while I code as it does slow me down. I am not a fast writer, so it takes me several hours to put a blog post together. In this case, it definitely helped me.

• Publishing blogs/projects/stackoverflow question&answers will lead to interactions years into the future. As another example, I have an answer on stackoverflow from 2015 that gets an upvote about once a quarter. It is fun to see that my work has helped other people, even if it is in a minor way.

• Squashing commits is easy to do on GitHub via the merge button on pull requests!

• I have since added a contributing file to the repository. It is not a large file. It points out the unit test and asks for unit tests for new functionality.

My first pull request was a good experience! I will continue to publish code and articles. They may be small projects and thoughts, but they give me opportunities to learn new things.

This post was originally posted on my blog