Progress report time! :)
A quick summary of what I’ve done: Learned how to setup the development environment(Vagrant), Node.JS, Selenium, Git, Gherkin, and how to submit patches to Gerrit (Mediawiki’s code review site). The original project’s timeline was to create tests for Echo notification extension during the course of the internship. I’m glad that the scope was kept small because I feel like I’ve learned and done more that I initially thought I could learn and do given the amount of time that has passed. The goal that has taken longer than expected is getting the patch merged. I thought it would be a faster process but see now how complicated continuous integration is. That said, it’s great to be able to view my commit and see what fails or not in Jenkins. This now give me a better feel as to how long the process can take.
If I were to start the project over, something I would do differently is reach out more when I was stuck. I tend to want to figure things out on my own, but I realize this costs time and that people are usually willing to help if you do reach out. I lost a couple of days when I was stuck on re-setting up vagrant and probably should have submitted a Phabricator task(Mediawiki’s task/bug tracking system) earlier concerning this.
For the second half of the internship I will continue to write tests and try and see if I can use more of the api functions already written in the core tests. I’d also like to have a smoother workflow when submitting patches to Gerrit.
A quick summary of what I’ve done: Learned how to setup the development environment(Vagrant), Node.JS, Selenium, Git, Gherkin, and how to submit patches to Gerrit (Mediawiki’s code review site). The original project’s timeline was to create tests for Echo notification extension during the course of the internship. I’m glad that the scope was kept small because I feel like I’ve learned and done more that I initially thought I could learn and do given the amount of time that has passed. The goal that has taken longer than expected is getting the patch merged. I thought it would be a faster process but see now how complicated continuous integration is. That said, it’s great to be able to view my commit and see what fails or not in Jenkins. This now give me a better feel as to how long the process can take.
If I were to start the project over, something I would do differently is reach out more when I was stuck. I tend to want to figure things out on my own, but I realize this costs time and that people are usually willing to help if you do reach out. I lost a couple of days when I was stuck on re-setting up vagrant and probably should have submitted a Phabricator task(Mediawiki’s task/bug tracking system) earlier concerning this.
For the second half of the internship I will continue to write tests and try and see if I can use more of the api functions already written in the core tests. I’d also like to have a smoother workflow when submitting patches to Gerrit.
