Why did I pick CampusPulse?

I originally wanted to contribute to a larger project for a larger humanitarian organization, such as Open Data Kit or Nava, and build connections to those companies. However, as this is the first time I’ve ever contributed to an open source project, I quickly found that it would be best to start with something like CampusPulse where I already had knowledge of its use cases, connections to its maintainers, and fellow students who were also learning to contribute to it. In short, I chose it for my connection to its mission and community, and will take what I learned to join another community for my second contribution.

What was contributing to CampusPulse like?

I definitely had the easiest time getting set up with CampusPulse homepage repo compared to the other repos I tried. It only required me to install Hugo to run in a development server. Henry Sanders kindly showed me how to fork a repo and and what making a pull request actually looked like. So big thanks to him. I immediately found a typo in the README file and decided to fix it in order to practice the process. Following the instructions from the sample blog post I made my pull request and got these four automatic errors. (Note: i am unable to add a link to this PR as it was accepted and is no longer visible, but here is the commit.)

Screenshot of 'Fix README typo' pull request with 4 failing checks.

I sent this screenshot to Adrian, the technical lead and maintainer, and he got back to me within a couple of hours about the issue. He said that there were some out -of-date settings he had to tweak and accepted my pull request. You can see that ‘codebase’ is now spelled correctly on the README.

What was my contribution?

With that process cleared up I went ahead and made a more signifigant contribution. I found an open issue ‘Idea: link to RIT web resources.’ The desired link was provided, so all I had to do was add it to the list of services. Each service on the homepage rendered as a clickable bubble with an icon, title, description, and of course the associated link. Each of these was stored in a datafile, so I just had to pick an icon from Fontaweesome, write the description, and add everything to the datafile. I had structured a website this way before, but I could tell it was designed to be easily added to. The CSS and JavaScript automatically applied themselves to the link I added. It definitely took me longer to figure how to go through the pull request process than it did to understand the codebase. I will note that there wasn’t a lot of documnetation of how the website was structured, or, for example, where the icons came from. Luckily I was familiar with Fontawesome and recognized links to it when I inspected the page and knew how to reference my chosen icon. This time my pull request immediately passed all checks and awaits merging.

Screenshot of 'Issue #2: added link to RIT web resources' pull request with 4 passing checks.

How much effort did this assignment require?

The contribution itself was fairly low effort! I just had to learn how to actually go through the branching/checkout/pull request process. But I owe the ease of this process to how easy it was to set up my environmment and run the CapusPulse homepage in developer mode.