Caroline's Open Source Contribution

by Caroline Hall

19 Jun 2017

Here is a link to my open source contribution pull request: https://github.com/csev/py4e/pull/131

Here is a link to where I found the typo: https://books.trinket.io/pfe/05-iterations.html#fnref1

If you scroll down to the section on minimum and maximim loops, there’s a strange bracketed [maximumloop] before a sentence in the text that is out of place. My edit was simply removing this typo. Finding the file within github was tricky at first because I didn’t see the directions on where to look for book code at the bottom of the screen until after I had searched through some files to find the code to edit. This was probably the greatest challenge, as it was hard to tell whether or not I was editing the correct file - which I think I did (hopefully this small change was somewhat helpful). I’m not sure if this is something I would do frequently with my current level of coding experience, as I’m not confident enough to make changes to someone else’s hard work, especially if it is an open source project with more complexity than altering a typo in a text book. I’d be afraid to mess up the code and ruin the fun for everyone else. However, this was a valuable learning experience to show what is possible with open source code and to see another glipmse into how coders interact and work together remotely.

Caroline is a first year Information Science Master's Candidate. She is passionate about renewable energy and the environment. She spends the majority of her time outside of class working for Strata Solar, a national solar farm developer, and United Solar Initiative, an international solar nonprofit. Find Caroline Hall on Twitter, Github, and on the web.