October 13, 2018 10:12 AM
Writing code is fun
Guys, (I know, no one reads this, who am I even addressing here?) I read and modified some code today. And it was fun. I love writing code. I think computers are awesome. But sometimes in the grind of work and trying to do everything in the best way possible, I forget that.
So last night I was trying to add some tests to my Teochew web app, and it was getting kind of tedious, so I wanted to take a break. I also needed some way to know that I still need to finish these tests. For this whole project, I've just had a single text file that I add notes to, but lately I've been wanting something more sophisticated. I wanted a real bug tracker. I had tried the bitbucket issue tracker, but I thought it was annoying to have to actually log into bitbucket in my browser. I decided to look for command line issue trackers, and I came across bitbucket-issue-manager.
I initially thought it just looked really spiffy, so I installed it. Then I realized I needed nodejs, and then I realized my version of Ubuntu is no longer supported, so I had to upgrade that. That was a long process of installing things, and reconfiguring things, but fast forward and I have the issue manager tool installed! Of course I go to run it and I realize there's a typo in the command name (already previously noted in an issue on the github repo). So I go mucking around renaming the command in my system. And I finally get it all to work, but I realize there are things I'd like modified in this tool.
But it's nodejs! I've literally never touched nodejs code before. Well, before today. Anyway, I decide to clone the repo and modify it. Turns out, nodejs is pretty easy to read. I modified the code to make the issues display the way I want, and it was really satisfying and it reminded me of how awesome the concept of "typing words on a computer and having things magically happen" is.
I actually wanted to modify the typo in the command name, but I didn't even see the typo in the code in the repo, so perhaps that's already been done and the package on npm hasn't been updated? That's a lot of other stuff that I don't understand. Well if I modify something in a useful way, maybe I'll see how the whole pull request thing works.
<< More Recent