What makes a good Pull Request?
Recently my first pull request to the AIOS Project was approved. Having never contributed to such a large project before, I had to navigate the complex realms of teamwork on GitHub.
The first thing a pull request needs is a good title. What exactly did you do? Use a header like docs:, patch:, feature: or maybe [docs], [patch], [feature] depending on the style in the project. The title should serve as a brief reminder of what you did in the pull request. For example, if I designed a style for each contributor to follow, the title could be something along the lines of docs: provided style guide for developers.
The pull request should include a description which explains the purpose of the changes even if they are separated into several commits. For example, my description in this commit explains pretty well what I did and what I want to do in the future, so that the approvers know exactly what I have in mind and can modify my changes accordingly.
The pull request should also contain concise changes. It's better if not too much is modified in each change, but don't make your pull requests redundant. Have one per general change such as code comments throughout the project and separate multiple different changes into different pull requests. This way approval can go faster and if the maintainers don't want the project to take the direction of your pull request excess effort will not have gone in vain.
All in all, making pull requests is an essential part of development on GitHub and contributing to open source projects.
Tags: development, growth