Pull Requests, Challenges, and Passing Good Information
Lambda Labs: Merchant Marketplace
My experience starts with my journey to become a Full-Stack Web Developer. Lambda School is where I decided to take the trip, which brings me to my final project in a multi-cultural, multi-discipline team, Merchant Marketplace.
Merchant Marketplace tries to solve the issue of bringing main street to the screen. Coronavirus has put a damper of strolling down main street and hitting the antique shops, artisan craft shops, and even specialty stores on a lazy afternoon. Working similar to Etsy or Ebay, this is more geared toward those hard to find items as well as building a community for like minded people.
The Importance of Pull Requests
So you have completed some section of coding, let’s say fixing seeds and any minor migration issues that usually happen with these. You need to communicate to the team exactly what type of coding you did before having them inspect it and approve code. This helps not only you keep up with the changes you implemented but future developers on the project or application will have a good history of how things progressed, if for any reason information needs to regress to a past point.
Forming Good Commit Habits
Which brings me to the heart of this article, I, myself, am still trying to form the habit of making good commit messages and I don’t always follow my own rule 😏. I think the following tips and fine-tuning the formula below for your own purposes can help you provide value information to teammates.
How this applies to my Lambda Labs Experience
During Labs, I have still not used that specific formula but tried to convey the pertinent information. I was not able to provide much code on the project but was able to offer challenges to pull requests. A good challenge takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of a pull request.
While seeing that functioning code may be correct, challenging things like linting error fix requests, and non-passing tests is essential to keep the code base clear of errors. These are not the big challenges. It was not until my own code participation was challenged. That I understood why pull requests and communication on pull requests are important to team learning.
In the particular instance above, I was happy, that I had spent my time with a pair-programming group throughout my time at Lambda. I was able to read the code and see how it was working in order to correct something we had learned time and again in order to fit the current code base. It not only helped me to be challenged but helped other team members learn how to read what the code was doing as well. It also helped that I knew how to explain since I had plenty of practice explaining to others.
So, in conclusion, my experience in Labs I learned just how important that early formula can be not only for myself, but may curb questions other developers may have later for pull requests you or other developers make. I will, in my professional life, be able to force better commit habits for myself. I, also, know I can gain more knowledge by questioning anything I am unclear on before approving anything in the future (Probably something I should have been doing since my first pull request in a team environment 🙃).
Merchant Marketplace 6 Weeks Later
Thanks to a great effort by the team I worked with during Labs, we were able to complete a lot of API configurations that will be useful to the project for the next group. I did manage to add some Design Lead things such as fonts and color scheme. I am hoping future teams can take my design documents and run with them to make this an amazing project later on. Check out the video below to see an overview of the project. Be sure to check me out on GitHub