Introduction

This was an interesting week as I got the opportunity to not only add a new feature to someones project, but test the same feature getting added to my project using remote branches. This new feature is adding the ability to use a TOML configuration file to provide config options without the user needing to type them in every time. I will talk about adding this new feature below. For this lab we also needed to test our pull requests using a remote branch, which I will also be discussing in this blog since I feel it's the main learning opportunity of this lab.

Adding the TOML configuration

When looking through the list of projects, I made sure not to choose one I already worked on. So I started working on one that's owned by one of my friends. I didn't realize that this would take a bit of setup to do. First, I needed to download and run ollama, the AI model that they used for their project. Since their project used typescript, I needed to run it in a different terminal than I'm used to, and once I got it to work I realized how slow ollama was at generating a response. I even asked him about it and he said others had problems with ollama being slow. But this didn't matter as I was still able to add the new feature (even though it took forever to test!). After reviewing my changes, he asked me to make a small change which I did, pushing the code and eventually having the pull request merged. Overall next time I will start this work earlier in case I run into similar issues, as I had to spend a decent amount of time today finishing and touching up this lab.

Remote branches

I need to admit that I did make a mistake in this lab. I didn't thoroughly test the code that came from the person that worked on my lab. So the code that got merged did have some issues. This was due to me misreading the lab, as I thought it just required another feature to be added to our projects. So I only ended up doing the remote branch stuff afterwards, and I realized there was a little mistake. However, I still did learn how to create and test on remote branches even after the fact. Next time, I will make sure to properly read the lab instructions and testing my project using a remote branch.

Conclusion

This lab was hard to work on as I not only needed to find issues to work on for hacktoberfest but I needed to juggle several other assignments this week. Despite this, I still learned a lot from this lab and pushed past my mistakes. Next time I will start these labs sooner and collaborate with the project owners at an earlier time to avoid stress.