First Contribution of Hacktoberfest

For the first week of Hacktoberfest, I contributed to Matrix-Appservice-Discord, a service that connects Discord to Matrix, an application that allows you to message people over multiple different messengers in one place.

The Issue

As I wanted to focus more on familiarizing myself with the process of contributing on Git, I chose a simple issue; fixing a spelling error. The issue involved correcting the misspelling 'insufficiant' to 'insufficient'.

The Fix

After forking the repo, I cloned the develop branch of the project and began my work. While Matrix-Appservice-Discord was written in TypeScript, I didn't need to use it for the purposes of this fix. I simply searched for instances of 'insufficiant' and changed them to 'insufficient'.


The two instances of 'insufficiant'


Creating the Pull Request

Once I finished the fix, I created a new branch on the forked repo, spelling-error-insufficiant, and pushed my changes to there. I then created a pull request to merge my branch with the develop branch on the original repo, stating which error I fixed in the commit message. I noticed that my pull request failed the automatic code tests, but it turned out that it wasn't and issue with the code. Afterwards, my pull request was accepted by a maintainer and merged into the original repo.

Issues and Lessons Learned

On my initial clone, I cloned the master branch of the repo, and tried to merge into develop. I noticed that there were conflicts because of differences in the master and develop branch. Eventually I figured out you can specify a branch when cloning. Once I solved the conflicts, I noticed that my code failed the automatic checks run by Github, despite only having changed 2 lines of code. After asking the maintainers I was informed that the issues were on the original code, and weren't caused by my changes. Finally, while creating the pull request, I learned that you can reference specific issues in the commit message,and Github will automatically connect the pull request with the issue.








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