Keane Nguyen

I felt so cool when I first started using Github to manage my little Python scripts a month ago. I felt like a pro; I was using the same system that countless other programmers use daily to build well-known projects. I felt potential: would my Github profile one day be full of awesomeness?

It seems like everyone says to start off by contributing to a project on Github. It’s pretty intimidating though! All of the code I see on Github is way over my head. And what if I make a mistake? But I found a way to start small as I set up this website. The Hugo documentation is pretty disorganized, and it was a struggle for me to understand what was going on when I first used Hugo. The documentation for this site’s theme, Cocoa-EH, is also very lacking. I occurred to me that Hugo really could use my help in improving its docs.

Well, as of today, I have given my help to an open source project; a Hugo collaborator accepted my pull request to update the official tutorial on setting up automated deployment with Wercker. Here’s how it all went down…

Last week, I went through the frustrating process of setting up my website to be automatically deployed to Github. I spent hours cursing at my computer monitor, figuring things out through trial and error. Somewhere along the line, I decided that I would go back and update the guide once I figured everything out.

And that’s what I did last weekend: I forked the Hugo repository and fixed the broken links, the out of date screenshots, the obsolete instructions. I pasted everything into Word for a spell check, and then submitted a pull request. I watched as Hugo’s various continuous integration services checked my PR. Honestly, it seemed pretty silly that they checked my build even though all I edited was docs.

“Whatever,” I thought.

Slowly, four green checks appeared. “All checks have passed,” Github said.

It was time to wait for approval.

I regularly checked Github for the next two days, impatiently waiting for my request to be approved so that I could write this very blog post about it. Finally, my request was approved. I excitedly looked at the tutorial on Hugo’s website to admire my handiwork. Everything looked perfect until I got to the very bottom of the page. The last revision date was way off! It was showing the date that the tutorial was first created, not the date that I had set for “lastmod” in the post’s front matter.

I posted a comment on my pull request asking what the cause was. A Hugo collaborator pointed out to me that the CI builds had actually printed an error in their outputs saying that my “lastmod” setting couldn’t be parsed. I had put “lastmod: 2017-2-26” instead of “lastmod: 2017-02-26”. Apparently, CI builds actually do matter, even if you’re not touching the software’s code! From now on, I will always be thorough and check the CI outputs.

Anyways, another pull request later and I had corrected my little mistake. At last, my work was done. Today you can view my changes to the tutorial in all their glory on Hugo’s website!

After that first experience, I feel a lot more confident about giving a small helping hand to some big projects. I’m more excited than ever to make more pull requests on Github. For now, my contributions will mostly be in documentation because I encounter a lot of open source projects with spotty and disorganized docs. I see this as a big problem; good docs help new users (like me) pick up programs (like Hugo) with minimal frustration. I want to be a part of ensuring that open source documentation is organized, well-written, and useful.