This afternoon I was came up with an idea of something I wanted to do with an internal tool at work. It didn’t quite do what I was looking for unfortunately, but I wasn’t sure if that was the case at first.
Chatting with the main developer Timmy Crawford on the project we realized it didn’t work, but that it could be a good thing to have. I’ve been wanting to learn how to work with Github for some time but just never have. Timmy took the time on, my whim, and helped me through making my first pull request making the needed changes and getting the new feature live. Thanks so much!
In the end it was only a few lines of code, and it took a few tries to get it right, but I now have code I contributed to running in production that is used by most of the people I work. Even if they don’t use the feature we added, it’s there available to them and that’s a cool feeling.
The project was also in CoffeeScript which I have never written in before, so that was a learning curve. It turns out CoffeeScript doesn’t like ternary operators with the question mark colon syntax. That was one of the tries that didn’t work 🙂 So x = test ? a : b; needed to be x = if test then a else b;
All in all it was a really fun evening, even if I did get a bit of dirty looks from Jen because I was on my laptop so long when we have house guests over, ooopps.
Sandy McFadden 
I remember my first pull request that was pulled into an open source project. It was pretty exciting!
And yes, coffeescript will mess with your mind. I like it a lot. The problem is, if you don’t know it and are trying to read it, it can get confusing. A bunch of things are optional, like parentheses, commas in some cases, curly brackets in several cases, etc…. ‘Tis fun 🙂
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Congrats! How exciting! What does the code do?
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