Juggling OpenWISP and Kiwi TCMS
Yesterday late night I received a review on my first PR to Kiwi TCMS. The number of changes requested overwhelmed me to a point that I could not sleep. Well, this is not new. During GSoC as well, exhaustive reviews always called me back from what I was doing and made me address them at the earliest. Do I call this “calling” a motivation or anxiety? I don’t know. The only thing I know is that it kept me up until I acted upon the review.
During the day, I received more reviews from the maintainers. These were quick reviews that only requested minor changes. Some changes were to assert the results more robustly while others were related to adopting alternative coding patterns. Overall, I think that this PR is complete for good. I hope it gets merged without any more reviews.
Yesterday, I commented on another issue to work on. The maintainer swiftly asked me to complete the current one before jumping over to something new. I must say that he has been very regular with his reviews. I don’t think he would ever be a blocker in my work. With his consistent reviews, I can iterate over my work to yield something fruitful.
While waiting for his reviews, I worked on OpenWISP. I strongly believe that I took up my maintainer role completely today. I have been told a couple of times to make decisions on the code independently. For starters, I am limiting these decisions to things which can not affect the project in a harmful manner.
Today was the day that I had to make a hard decision, whether to ask the contributor to make changes in the PR or make those changes myself. The PR in question has been open for over 20 days now. We have been playing ping pong with reviews. And for most of it, I am the one to be blamed. I have been a huge blocker for this PR. My reviews were exhaustive and provided good alternative measures to achieve the goal but they were not regular. I heavily stalled the progress of this PR.
I think I did the right job taking up the chore myself and improving the existing contribution.
In other news
Merging a PR even when it has approvals from other maintainers gives me chills. I had to take up deep breaths before clicking that “Merge” button. Till now I have shown accountability for the code I wrote. I believe it is the time when I take responsibility for the code I merge.