Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Pull Requests instead of Emailing Code



If you modify code from an open source repository, such as GitHub or BitBucket, here are the reasons why you should submit a pull request to get your code back into the main repo.



  • To avoid paying the stupid tax.
    • In short, your feature or fix will be available in future versions that you might want to use. If your code doesn't get into the master branch then it makes it difficult or impossible to keep up with future versions.
  • Make open source better.
    • If you've fixed a bug or added a feature then it's highly likely that others will need that.
  • Improve your resume.
    • More and more recruiting managers are looking at what you've done when they're hiring you. Having contributed to an open source project is a great way to show that you've done real work that people are using.
  • Get Credit
    • You've done the work. Now get your name on that repo and take credit for some of the work that you've done.
  • Use the Tools
    • Do you use Git? Have you ever submitted a pull request? These are questions you might be asked at an interview. Try it and practice it so you can demonstrate this skill. Even if I was hiring a junior right out of school I'd expect them to have at least done this.
  • Understand someone else's code-base
    •  Making a contribution to someone else's code-base forces you to read their code and understand their style and way of architecting a project. This is an invaluable skill as 80% of the work you do is reading over code. Even if you wrote it you'll have forgotten it to the extent that it becomes foreign in a few months time.
 This list came from a conversation that I was having with the owner of the ABot project on GitHub. ABot is a web crawler (spider) built for speed and flexibility.


He was telling me how other developers will add features to ABot and then email the code to him. If he decides to accept the code and integrate it into the project then it's all getting committed by him under his name. He was telling me how he doesn't want the credit for this work. By not submitting your code through a pull request on GitHub it makes it very difficult to give the credit to the person who did the work.

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