After making my contribution and pull request, the feedback I received was very beneficial to me. I did not have to wait long to receive my feedback from the maintainers, which I found very valuable and could ensure improvement without long waits.
My Contribution
My contribution involves the 626 issue, for which I created an example notebook visualising the Reissner-Nordström metric, and incorporating it into the project alongside other example metrics and visualisations.
This involved understanding the mathematical formula, writing new code in python, updating any details or features needed. My main focus was to understand the role of a contributor in an open source project and its community.
Feedback and Corrections
The community itself was incredibly supportive, help me though many steps in the project.
They pointed out multiple ares that could be improved to match their standards.
At first it was requested I change the name of my branch and state the appropriate PR description, once done I received a bit more feedback.
This next feedback helped me realise something I completely overlooked, my example notebook was to be entered around non-electro vacuum metrics, whilst my chosen Reissner-Nordström metric. happened to be electro-vacuum. This is a massive mistake that I would not have recognised had it not been for the feedback. However, even though my contribution was technically now irrelevant to the project, the community was very supportive on helping me complete it, which, even though it is embarrassing on my part, still shows the inclusivity and support in this community.
In terms of presentation I was given feedback on my Markdown style, and to make sure my titles were capitalised. This helped improve my work meet the issue’s standards.
Here I accidentally deleted some necessary parts in files involved in my pull request. It was recommended that ti restore this. This mistake I have been attempting to fix for a while, however, I am very grateful that the community is trying to help me fix, which can improve my pull request.
Each time I received feedback it was always positive and encouraging, which brings me confidence and gave me an overall happy first real contribution experience.
Lessons Learned
Through this experience, I learned the importance of:
- Ensuring your code is clean, easy to understand and maintain is most important.
- Communication and encouragement are essential to open-source projects.
- Continuous updating and improvements to open source contributions can help benefit learning and growth as a contributor and coder.
I want to note that this is a project that I have grown very fond of and will continue working on. Therefore, my work can keep improving which can benefit this and other open source projects in the future. Unfortunately due to the deadline of this unit I am not able to continue documenting it, however I will contribute to hopefully other issues after resolving the pull request here. It has helped me uncover many minor but crucial mistakes that can be made in open source. I had planned it to be alot easier than my experience. I have established good communication with the community who I believe will help encourage a new contributor like me to better my skills and functionality of my contributions.
Overall, contributing to a project like einsteinpy has been an amazing opportunity to make mistakes and understand more about contributing to open source projects. I really appreciate date communities quick responses, well thought out feedback and inclusive community. I look forward to growing further alongside this project and other open source projects and communities.
In comparison my first contribution’s pull request ended being successful and everything completed appropriate. However, I never learnt much about open source communities until einsteinpy. I’m glad I made mistakes that I am able to learn from not only. my skills but how supportive and positive this community is.
Below here I have attached the link to the conversation where this pull request and all forms of communication took place: https://github.com/einsteinpy/einsteinpy/pull/657
Thank you for reading my blog and understanding the beginning of my open source journey!