Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through my little adventure with, uh, Alexander Bublik. Not the tennis player, though that would be cool too. This is about something totally different, a small project I was messing around with.
It all started last week, right? I was bored, scrolling through GitHub, and stumbled upon this interesting repo. It was a super basic script, did one simple thing, but I thought, “Hey, I can probably make this way better.” So, I forked it. Classic move, right?
First things first, I cloned it locally. Fired up my VS Code. The code was… rough. Like, seriously rough. No comments, variables named like ‘a’ and ‘b’. You know the drill. Spent a good hour just trying to figure out what the heck it was actually doing.
Then, the fun began. I started refactoring. Renamed variables to be more descriptive. Added some comments to explain the logic. Broke the whole thing down into smaller, more manageable functions. That alone made a HUGE difference.
Next up, I wanted to add some features. The original script only did X, but I wanted it to also do Y and Z. This involved a lot of Googling, a lot of Stack Overflow, and a lot of trial and error. There were moments where I almost gave up, where I thought, “This is too hard.” But I kept at it.
One of the biggest challenges was dealing with [Specific Problem]. I spent like, half a day just wrestling with that. Eventually, I found a solution that involved [Brief Explanation of Solution]. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. And honestly, sometimes that’s all that matters.
After I added the new features, I needed to test everything. Wrote some unit tests (which I probably should have done earlier, but hey, live and learn). Fixed a bunch of bugs. Rinse and repeat. It was a tedious process, but crucial.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I was happy with the result. I pushed my changes back to my forked repo. And then… the moment of truth. I created a pull request to the original repo. Now, it’s up to the original author to decide if they want to merge my changes. Fingers crossed!
The Takeaway?
- Even a simple project can be a learning experience.
- Refactoring is your friend.
- Don’t be afraid to Google. Seriously, everyone does it.
- Testing is important (even if you skip it sometimes).
- And most importantly, don’t give up!
It wasn’t a groundbreaking achievement, but it was a fun little project. And who knows, maybe someone will actually find it useful. That would be pretty cool.
