The Merge Conflicts of Life

Hello my fellow strugglers,

This week in Open Source Development we were tasked with making a couple of small features to our ever growing and glorious link checker program.

TBH. 

I feel like there is nothing glorious about this program and the way I did it. I am realizing this the hard way. Even though Selenium gets the job done, but at what cost, something like this would be written better in plain java. Eliminate all these dependencies.

Anyways, before I go off topic too much, we had to implement 2 small features or "upgrades" if you will.

The first feature I chose was to add in exit codes, really simple. Since I had made a separate function to check links all I had to do was put the function call in main in a nice little try and catch. If anything went wrong an exception would be thrown and a boolean variable would be made false and would exit with an exit code of 1. Super simple even my cat could write it.

My second feature however, took a little thought. I implemented a command line argument to check for good, bad, and all links with their respective arguments. Sounds easy, but  I had to refactor a lot of my old code to make it happen.

BUT!

That was not the point of the lab. The point of the lab was to merge the 2 branches together and see if we get any merge conflicts and deal with them.

Alas, my two features were complete and it was time to merge them. Naturally my first merge went without a sweat.

Time for my second merge.

MERGE CONFLICT!!!!!!!!

Of course there was a merge conflict, why wouldn't there be one. Life couldn't have just given me this one favor this week.

Meh, W.E.

I opened up my IDE and checked out what the issue was. To my benefit it was just a couple of lines that were having problems with each other. Easy fix!

Thank goodness that was over because I had just came off a whole nighter for one of my other courses (Game dev....)

I had to fix a merge conflict before and it got real messy because I didn't know what I was doing I never encountered one before and had no experience with them.

TBH.

I would not change anything next time when merging something because working on different branches and having these small merge conflicts are just part of the fun road to success.

I am now going to stare at my screen pretending I know what is happening work on some data structure labs.

Till next time,

XOXO,

Gossip Plamen