Tuesday, September 4, 2012

My first pull request

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

That single step for me, in my carrier, is learning python. A fun loving, magnificent beauty. For me, programming is like raising a baby. Initially, the baby girl doesn’t know anything. As a dad, its my responsibility to teach her what to expect, how to react & what to respond. For me, it is more than art. Its parenting. I take care of her so that, she never crashes. To ensure that she  can be fixed when someone breaks her, I should write great test cases. She is just a kid right? She is not mature enough to take care of her all by herself. So I have to make sure that she is always happy by employing some care taker who always look after her changes. Buildbot is her caretaker. When some one breaks her, buildbot will notify me where I can fix her right away.

So I was trying to get buildbot up and running. For some unknown reasons, it did not start. It just crashed. When I looked at the logs, it said that “twisted.web.errors.NoResource” was missing. Well that was weird. So I decided to go through the source-code of twisted. And “No Resource” was no where to be found. I got confused. Only then I found out that Twisted was updated to 12.2 just a few minutes ago.

There was a breaking change in it. “NoResource” has been removed. It was not there. The only thing that appeared to be similar to it was “Errors” So quickly without thinking anything else, I patched it and send a pull request.

I was happy, because it was my first contribution for a big project. Then next day when I checked my mail, I was sad. Looked like “NoResource” has been moved to “Twisted.web.Resource” package. I was dumb enough that I failed to see it. My pull request has not been accepted. It was fixed by some one else. Then I remembered something.

”I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Yes, I just found one way in which I cannot submit a pull request.

“If You’ve Never Failed – You Haven’t Tried Hard Enough to Succeed”
“Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.”

I am happy that my pull request got rejected. If a person always agrees to what you say, then you sort of never learn anything. It is only while someone disagrees you, you learn something new.