Week 11 - COVID-19 + Git

COVID-19

Living in the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic is scary and overwhelming, especially when > 90% of the news coverage revolves around my home - Queens. The borough, which is home to many hardworking families, is being hit the hardest because of the lack of support for these underserved communities. Most families are living paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet, and unfortunately, don’t have the privilege to work from home. Thankfully, many organizations and individuals have made donations to relieve the financial burden of working, low-income families due to the virus.

With everything going on, I was glad to stumble upon an online challenge that brought me and other NYers comfort and laughter under these trying times. The “Best NY Accent” challenge highlighted NYers from all boroughs and their unique accents. Although I was born and raised in Queens, I don’t have a full on NY accent but there are times where you can hear pieces of it trickle in. Still, it’s not as good as these awesome challenge submissions (which you should totally watch!)

Since New York has been affected greatly by COVID-19, I researched on open efforts made to help the state. In my research, I found an open data initiative by the New York State Deparment of Health in which they openly publish COVID-19 Testing data. This data set is updated daily and contains information on how many tests were given, how many of the tests were positive, the county the tests were conducted in, and the individual’s gender. The NYS DOH uses this data in their COVID-19 tracker, which gives a visual representation of the affected counties in NY. Since this data is updated on a daily basis and is free to use, anyone can create their own COVID-19 tracker or analyze the data for trends.

Git at 3AM

Last week, my team and I sent in our first pull request to OpenFoodFacts, which organized their documentation on installation so that new contributors wouldn’t have the same difficulty we had when setting up the dev enivironment. So far, we’ve gotten 3/4 approvals from mods and are hopefully on the verge of a merge (haha). But after sending in the request, I realized that we made 17 commits for a simple fix. 17. Since our pull request hasn’t been merged (yet) nor looked at (until today), I wanted to find a way to “squish” our commits into a smaller number. I watched this helpful tutorial on rewriting git commit history and learned about squashing commits, which can combine commits into one. After doing so, I ended up with diverged branches which is something I’m not familiar with. I didn’t want to affect the current state of our pull request so I left it as is but I’ve learned a lot about rebase and commits by experimenting this myself.

Now, we are currently working on our dark mode feature for the website and are projected to finish by next week!

Written before or on April 20, 2020