Good First Issue

It's defined as an easy pickings from popular projects. OH! It was easy to pick, doesn't mean it was easy to work on. I really wanted to pick machine learning projects, and when I saw that Dagshub had some issues they wanted to fix, I jumped in. Crazy enough, I did not realize how big this project was. Okay, I am at best an intermediate with coding. I can look through modules and reverse engineer how each module links to one another. That being said, this one took a while. It was thousands of lines of code.

Biting off More Than I Can Chew

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's start from the beginning. Long ago, in a faraway land called Canada, I decided to challenge myself to work on machine learning, just because that's the field I want to be in. So the categories were all there:

• ✅ Machine Learning.
• ✅ Python coding.
• ✅ Hacktoberfest label.
• ✅ "Good First Issue."

It was all there, so what did I do? I commented and took the issue Issue 366. I mean, it sounded simple enough: update a function so that we can download all data with no arguments involved.

Questioning My Choices

I realized this project was huge when I couldn't get it to work. I had to install, reinstall everything for the past few days until somehow, some miracle happened, and I was able to make it work. Now, once I got it to work, it was time to make the changes. After some extensive soul-searching and some very questionable pieces of coding, I was able to determine that this was the only thing I needed to do.

fields = [field.name for field in self.datasource.fields if field.valueType == MetadataFieldType.BLOB]

Now why did I say it was hard? It was because I was overwhelmed by the size of the project, and somehow, they asked me to get and import Python black and import modules from another file called MetadataFieldType. Then they realized that they were missing a proper Contribute.md, so they had to raise an issue. Which showed me that even a big company can find faults in a simple humble contributor like me.

But I CANNOT EMPHASIZE enough how hard it was to run it... I was ready to reformat my entire system from all the things I had to install just to run it properly. After everything was said and done, I was able to finish it and count my lucky stars.

All in all, that was a nice first experience! Now it's time for part 2... ON TO THE NEXT ONE!