This blog will talk about my experience regarding the final PR I made towards Hacktoberfest. If you have read my previous blogs, you would know that I am enrolled in an open-source development course at Seneca College. Participating and completing Hacktoberfest is part of the curriculum, and I completed all four PRs by solving issues in different open-source repositories. I have already written blogs for the first three PRs, and this blog is about the fourth one.
When I was looking for the fourth issue, I wanted to contribute to a project that uses the C# language. This was because, for my first three PRs, I contributed to JavaScript and TypeScript projects, and I wanted to push myself further by tackling an issue in another programming language. After JavaScript, the second-best language I know is C# because I am working on an ASP.NET project called StyleMate, and I worked with ASP.NET during my co-op at the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP). So, I filtered the trending repositories on GitHub by the C# language, but I was unable to find any good issues for me. After that, I started exploring the contributions of other students from my open-source class, and luckily, I found a repository called libplanet.
Libplanet is a .NET library for creating multiplayer online games in a decentralized fashion, meaning the entire gameplay occurs on a peer-to-peer network among equal nodes rather than on a centralized server. Under the hood, it incorporates many features (e.g., digital signatures, BFT consensus, data replication) of a blockchain. The issue I worked on was related to the removal of redundant code from one of the utility classes called TestUtils, which was used for unit testing.
The first task for me was to figure out what testing framework had been used by Libplanet, and after going through their Contribution.md, I found that the library uses Xunit.net for testing purposes. I have worked with Xunit before, so it was not new to me. I tried building the project locally, but I got an error saying the project was using .NET 6, and my PC had .NET 8. As a result, I installed .NET 6. After that, I made the changes and tried running the unit tests. Initially, I was confused because I was looking for TestUtils in the test output but couldn’t find it. After some time, I realized that TestUtils is a utility class used by other unit tests, and I found some tests that used TestUtils in their code. The code worked as expected, so I messaged on the issue with the new code, and the repo maintainer asked me to submit a PR.
Following that, I made a PR, mentioning the code changes and requesting a review. Interestingly, the maintainer requested a rebase because the main branch had a few commits after I created the issue branch.
I rebased the PR to the latest changes on the main branch and committed the updates. Finally, my PR got merged, and I am officially done with Hacktoberfest. Even though Hacktoberfest is completed, I am planning to continue this open-source journey.
Top comments (1)
Great to hear about your Hacktoberfest journey! It's awesome that you pushed yourself beyond your comfort zone with C# and tackled a project using a .NET framework. The experience of working with libplanet and its decentralized gameplay sounds interesting - I'll have to check it out!