Experience with raising PR

This post deals with my experience on contributing to the open source project - Microsoft Documentation.

My first PR

This is not my first PR to an OSS. My very first contribution was to foambubble/foam. The pull request adds licence file to the repo. Yea, I know. This may not qualifies for core technical task. Nevertheless its my contribution. This lead to my Github badge - Pull Shark.

I started interacting with the developers on the fix on April 14^th 2021. Foam’s riccardoferretti was helpful. After series of conversation and some corrections, my changes were merged on April 19^th 2021. Just 4 days.

Lessons learnt: Stick to one issue in a Pull request.

My Second PR

My second PR is with the Microsoft Documentation site. The mojor difference I see is the time it took to merge the changes into the main branch.

During my work I noticed the error in syntax of mssparkuitls.fs.mv. While creating the syntax in the learn.microsoft.com, the syntax of copy is reused for move. After noticing it during the day job it took me at least a fortnight to work on the changes(thanks to lazy me).

I managed to raise the PR on September 6^th 2023. There were no interaction with any of the developer. The Pr was finally merged somewhere around mid November 2023. Yes, it took 3 months to merge a simple change to documentation. The reason mentioned in the conference was the upcoming Ignite conference. Isn’t the difference between a big corporate and an upcoming startup (foam). I used to check the PR status almost everyday for a month or so. And lost interest and ignored its existence.

Lessons learnt: Be patient in OS eco-system.