Watch the video here!

My very first published video! This concept has been floating around in my head for a very long time, and I’ve constantly delayed putting it into action, but here we are. I’ve brought up this idea for years with (extremely supportive) coworkers, but everyone struggles taking the first plunge. Hopefully this is the first of many, and others find this content entertaining or educational.

I struggled at first finding a reasonable way to pick a “random” issue off GitHub. There exist some other sites online which claim to do this for you, but apparently there is quite the problem with spam issues. I settled for using the GitHub REST API for issue searching, which allowed me to apply filters to reduce the number of spam issues that were returned. In particular, filtering issues with interactions:>0 was extremely helpful. I had to flick through a couple pages of issues before I found something that seemed manageable, but eventually found this issue.

datavzrd is a tool for generating static HTML/JS reports from CSV/TSV data. It seems like this might be useful to produce quick dashboards for datasets which are rarely (or never) updated. The particular issue I found was a feature request to support hiding long text content in pills and showing an ellipsis instead. The original content of the pill would be available via a tooltip hover.

This was an extremely satisfying first issue, and was exactly the type of content I hoped to produce. Finding out that parts of the project was written in Rust, struggling for way too long with a simple build issue, and working with jQuery for the first time in 10 years are the types of honest software experiences I wanted to share. I was glad I was able to produce a pull request in my first video, and nice to see that the pull request was received so enthusiastically by the project owner.

I also learned a ton from producing this video. My audio setup isn’t great, I need to learn to watch my breathing, and I definitely shouldn’t be eating chips while trying to record a video. I’m also somewhat dissapointed by the quality of the pull request I ended up creating, specifically around whitespace standards in the project. I want to make sure that the contributions I’m making feel authentic and high-quality, and not forced in any way because I have a desire to turn them into YouTube content. Lots to improve on!