Participating in my first open-source challenge has been the most memorable experience. Starting with the very first day, I had no idea how I was going to be able to have a successful merge in a very short time. Normally, it takes months let alone years for some major repositories of reviewing your changes before they can finally be merged into their codebase. This process has been shortened with the use of cloud version control providers such as GitHub.

Github allows various open-source repository maintainers to review one’s pull request and provide comments easily from any part of the world. Thanks to the GitHub actions feature, automated CI/CD tools have already been deployed that can easily run alongside your commit and pull request then provide you a report on whether the tests were successful or not with a conclusive report on what failed. I started off by looking at various issues they all face within their issues tab. As I was interacting with my day-to-day job search on various platforms, I realized with a sector software company, a New York-based startup had only Jobs from Indeed integrated into their playbooks. As I was trying out my various projects , I had previously come across a web scrapping tutorial that gave me the ins and outs of ethical web scrapping.

On noticing that this was a possibility to get more jobs easily into this platform and have a centralized jobs review system with easy ads to my playbooks, I decided to do some more research on the various job boards available for various companies. These included greenhouse, lever, nten, LinkedIn Jobs and the power to fly Job boards.

I then started experimenting with website scrapping with Ruby on rails where I had to learn the ruby on rails code structure and how to use ngroki. I was able to test out the web scrapping within my rails console.

Next was integrating my code with that of the bloc_platform / sector software repository. I had to set up the repository on my local machine. This took about 2 days since I was new to how ruby versioning works and using ruby on rails.

The joy of finally running the website on local host was another story to tell.So now I was able to fork their repository and create my own branch where I can do my own changes. Then after that I created a pull request that was successfully reviewed by one of the project maintainers and with a few suggestions, I managed to make the necessary changes and pushed them to the pull request.