Topics in Open Source Development

Contributing Unit Tests to Pandas The issue that I decided to work on this week was one of the easier issues discussed in my last blog, however it gave me valuable experience with unit testing in Python and Pandas specifically. I decided to start my 2019 open-source contributions with unit testing because I haven't had much experience with unit testing previously in Python.  Overview of the Issue https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/21205 As I previously stated in my last blog, this issue shed light on an issue with using NaT when converting a Series to a Period using the dt.to_period('D') function. Other datetime64[ns] objects with values have no problem converting into a Period, however when a NaT was passed in, it stayed as datetime64[ns]. NaT represents a missing value for datetime objects. Since the issue was posted, it has been resolved with current updates to the master branch. However, one of the moderators asked for unit tests that would ens...

Outstanding Pandas Issues Currently Pandas has over 2,700 issues that are still open. Most of these issues are currently taken by somebody or are being worked on. However, with such a big project and so many issues, some people don't succeed in solving what they started, or simply lost interest in solving the issue that they asked to work on. Once the moderators notice that the issue is no longer being worked on, they close the stale pull requests referencing the issue and try to update the issue in order to let people know that it still needs to be solved. This week I went on a hunt for abandoned issues from 2017 and 2018. There are three issues that I found that I would like to work on within the next month and attempt to solve them. In addition to the three issues, I have found some extra issues that I would be working on in case I'm unsuccessful with any of the top three issues. Issue 1 - Casting Data Types https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/21513 ...

Project Considerations for Beginning of 2019 After exploring different aspects of open-source for a few months and blogging about what I've been exploring, it was nice to take a few weeks off and go on a vacation. However, 2019 has begun and I'm well rested and ready to jump back into contributing more to big open-source projects and exploring more difficult bugs. For the next few months I will most likely focus on one major open-source project in order to try to fix complicated bugs that might take me a long time to figure out. So in order to not waste time on startup costs of exploring a new project, I will focus all my time fixing complex bugs in a single project. Although I would like to continue working on Pandas, it is important for me to explore a couple other options that I would be interested in. In this blog I will talk about 3 projects that I'm considering to work on for the next few months. Project 1 - Pandas Pandas is a famous open-source library for...