While I’ve gotten used to sharing most of my code projects in GitHub for the most part my repos are a one dog band.
joe jangles One Man Band Street Performer Ann Arbor Art Fair July 24, 20103 flickr photo by stevendepolo shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Rarely, I get a message submitted via issues, but for the most part I’ve maybe gotten less than 5 “pull” requests– meaning someone has added, fixed, augmented my spaghetti like code piles.
Well, thanks to Anne-Marie Scott, I can change that tune. She has been a fan and user of SPLOTs (e.g. the WikiMedia Basics and others using SPLOTpoint), but there was hint of more happening:
I birthed a #SPLOT.
It's an ugly child, but can probably be improved with some care and love.
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) October 7, 2018
As detailed in her post, she has been ripping apart and re-assembling some of them for her own purposes.
But I knew she was figuring her way through SPLOT code when she took the trouble to parse some of my recent updates to TRU Collector and TRU writer SPLOTs to make the same changes to SPLOTbox — thus the “pull request” for her changes.
I know all too well that even well documented code can be hard to follow; and my PHP style tends to be rather sprawling long code strands, rather than the more chopped up and spread across a million functions and classes way “real” programmers do (I am learning though).
And thus, in the issues conversation as I let her know I’d check out the changes and merge:
Very cool, you might be the very first person to actually submit a real code update. Will look it over in my morning, but I’m seeing about all the files listed that would need updates.
I get a lollipop for this – right?
Of course, a big lollipop or as I understand they are called there, a “lolly”, amirite?
And on testing, she got everything correct (including a mis-named variable in an IF statement in the code she worked from, fixed that). And while I was in there, I decided to change the logic of the page template that can be used to list all media items in the SPLOTbox by the kind of usage rights listed– now it only lists the license that have one or more items using it, rather than a list off all with a bunch of zeroes.
Before the change, a view would look like this:
Now it will only list the usage licenses if there is a non-zero count, see it in action here http://splot.ca/box/licensed/
And now that she has her lolly, as well as her SPLOT chops, I bet she can now build out her own original SPLOTs. I look forward to seeing that happen.
Featured Image: Added a screenshot of Anne Marie’s GitHub pull request and the SPLOT logo to pixabay image by carynfitz shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0.
