OSD600 - Lab 1 - Testing and Reviewing

Networking on Slack

The first step in getting by code reviewed and tested was speaking to my peers in our Slack server. At first it was a little intimidating to post my code to be reviewed because I was nervous about being judged however after seeing how helpful my peers could be I was excited to see what they could help me with. And vice versa, I was excited to see what I could help others with. Overall, taking the first step and posting my repo and seeing my peers give feedback was exciting. 

Getting Reviewed   

I had a couple people point out issues and provide helpful solutions with my code. First I had Michael Brackett find some grammatical mistakes in my README file as well as provide me useful insight and resources into the differences between the request and urllib modules in python. This allowed to get a second look at my README to make sure there were no mistakes and give me a chance to make a more informed decision on which module to use. Next Thomas-Jayrell LeBlanc was able to help me clean up my code by showing me how to use the colorama module more efficiently. Lastly Mohammed Ahmed was able to create a setup.py for me which allowed my program to install requirements on its own and drop the .py. This was very helpful because I learned something completely new that will be helpful with all the python scripts I make moving forward.


Reviewing Code

Matt's Repo

I decided to review Matthew Ross's code and I choose to take a look at his code because he was also using python and that would allow me to be more helpful since I was as well. The first thing I noticed from Matt's code was that it was clean and easy to read which was a positive, I honestly couldn't find much to improve in that area. The first small improvement I was able to make was to make the URL list a set as to avoid having to use resources to check the same link twice. Next, I was able to see that a try-except block could be used to catch errors that would cause no http status to return avoiding the script crashing if it ran into that problem. Overall, I thought Matt's code was clean and I was glad to be able to contribute the small improvements I did. 

Overall Thoughts

This was my first time working on projects in this way and it was really an interesting process. I think moving forward, I will be more engaged in the collaborative process of open source development, as its not as intimidating as it seems and is actually a great way to learn and build your coding knowledge. 

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