Hi everyone,
Back again with another step on my journey into the Open Source community. This time, I was tasked with looking into a fellow student's project and implementing a feature that they previously didn't have. While looking through projects, I found that Jasper Mui's Link Checker.
While examining his project, I first felt like I could implement checking links that were archived and putting in a feature to handle them. As I was testing his project out, however, I discovered that certain broken links led to his program crashing. This was proven by parsing through this Dead Link Collection, which a few of the links led to a wall of errors.
So, I shifted focus, and tried to determine what the cause of the issue was.
Within his project, he used the fetch() command to open the URL being provided, but when it came to a link that timed out on request, an UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning began showing up, described as a FetchError. Upon further investigation, I determined that the response being created from the fetch() call was in need of some sort of error handling.
So, prior to checking the status codes of the fetch responses, I first added a condition to see if the response was "ok". If it was, I let the program carry on with outputting the status of the links. However, if the response came back with any issues, I threw an error, and outputted that the link was bad when the error was caught.
After a few more tests, I felt comfortable committing these additions, and submitting my first pull request!
For my first time contributing to another project, the process seemed to go relatively smoothly. I was able to find a problem I previously wasn't expecting to run into, and was able to narrow down the cause with a few quick searches. I even remembered to adjust Jasper's README to include the mention of this new feature.
I am also currently going through the process of accepting the first pull request to my own project, but it has yet to be resolved at the time of this post. I'll be sure to go into more detail on this in a future post!
Thanks for checking in once again, and I hope my experience can help you out with your future endeavours!
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