coala - COde AnaLysis Application

June 1, 2017

How working with coala changed my life? :-)

The coala community

With community bonding period ending today, I believe I have been involved with coala for a while now and I am so proud to acknowledge how beginner friendly, intelligent and collaborative the coala community is- well, we can almost judge it from the fact that coala where number of developers exceed the number of users. :-) It is pertinent to a definition of open source software - where the users are treated as co-developers.

My experience with coala

Browsing through the organisations selected for the Google Summer of Code 2017, a cute coala koala caught my eye - this was when I started exploring it.

So, my timeline:

• I started through the newcomer’s guide - an ultimate guide to be a coala developer. It contains briefly and elaborately everything one needs to know to start contributing to coala and the best thing is that it gives clearly indication of what next.
• When I first joined the gitter channel, I just typed in hello world and boom - I was invited by @sils in a couple of minutes, and lurking around for just a few minutes gave me an idea of how people worked around there way with cobot.
• cobot told me to look for some beginner-friendly issues and I assigned myself an issue.
• I did solved the core issue but had to amend my commit ten times or so to fix small nitpicky things - ah, perfectionist fantasy I love.
• As I waited for someone to review my PR, I would review some of the PR’s in the meantime - it was necessary and gave me a feel of how it felt to be on the other side of the wall. I believe that reviewing PR’s is more crucial than having to actually write code.
• Finally after someone ack’ed my PR and asked me to rebase, I was so excited. Solving that issue was a big leap as I had a much better understanding of the workflow followed - keeping a linear git commit history, I soon realised how maintainability was totally worth the amount of effort put in.
• I started working on a couple more issues.
• Visited projects.coala.io thousands of time, trying to find the best fit according to my capabilities, and finally found out vulture. After reading the description over there a zillion times, I finally managed to have an overview of the situation.
• I tried to delve into vulture, trying to pick up something beginner friendly, when I found out an issue about creating whitelists, that was an easy pick.
• I quickly contacted Jendrik (creator of vulture, my mentor and an awesome personality) about how to finish things. He helped a lot by providing his technically enriched insight.
• We managed to close that issue within a day or two.
• Me and Jendrik then thought of a way of how we could run vulture on different python projects, which would help making vulture popular and help us with making our default whitelist more usable.
• I started writing my proposal - It was just a reflection of my discussions with Jendrik.

All the while, whenever I encountered any problem, people readily helped with overwhelming politeness. It feels so open-sourcey :-)