Upstream Without a Paddle
If you up a river without a paddle, you are in an unfortunate situation, unprepared and with none of the resources to remedy the matter.
During this week I was tasked to work on one of my fellow classmate’s link checkers (a command line program that checks the statuses of URLs contained within a file). I decided to work on rubyAnne’s Link Reaper and add additional flags to her command line argument options. I posted and issue with the goal to add a -ignore tag to ignore certain URLs (contained in the a separate text file).
As stated above, it would work something like this:
python linkReaper.py readfile [WEBSITE.html] --ignore [IGNOREME.txt]Going about this was a bit difficult as it required me to learn another library for command line argument parsing. If you have read my previous blog, Merging It All Together, you know that I am not a stranger to reading documentation. That’s essentially what I did for five hours — reading the documentation of the click library, experimenting with different approaches and trying to figure out how to make a sub command with these newly learned tools. Eventually I came up with a solution, but not without paying a price. I had to make a lot of changes to the base code and I wasn’t sure if rubyAnne would accept it. Regardless, I chose to send her a message and together we connected my repo to her machine. Hopefully she was able to see and run my changes and as of writing this I have yet to hear back and see if she merged my changes or even accepted them.
If I were to do things differently, I think I would’ve started earlier. I’ve learned that working with others online takes time, especially when it comes to coding with another busy student. Each change you make essentially needs to be seen and tested — if those edits were not satisfactory, you need to take the comments and criticisms and start the process again. Edit until satisfactory, repeat until merged.
