Contributing to Open Source

It is such an amazing feeling to hear other people talking about using code you've written, without even knowing you were the one to do it.

My bootcamp, Launch Academy, has been working on a Ruby gem called 'make_it_so' that will allow students and developers to get up and running on Rails projects even easier than with 'rails new.'  It contains React and Webpacker from the start, and makes new projects really simple to get going.  The one thing that was missing was 'database_cleaner'.  It was really frustrating to have tests pass the first time, and give you errors the second time because of identical entries in your database.  Almost everyone in the class that was writing tests found themselves needing to add database_cleaner to their code.

So I forked 'make_it_so', added an installation and tests for database_cleaner, and committed a pull request. 

Now I hear people in class saying things like "Oh, I'm using the pre-database_cleaner make_it_so, and my tests are failing - how can I install it?" and it's really cool to know that the next class of students won't have to worry about it.  Of course, an argument could probably be made that I didn't appreciate database_cleaner enough until I didn't have it in a project, but that's an argument for another time.