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Struggle, the road to growth

It has been more than 3 weeks into my Outreachy internship with Wikimedia foundations. The internship started well and the project that I'm working on is about evaluating Microsoft playwright as a possible replacement to the current automation testing framework being used. Week one was mostly about setting up the Wikimedia core by forking and cloning the Wikimedia core repository from Github. In order to simplify continuous integration, we are using Github as our code hosting platform to evaluate playwright instead of using Gerrit. The setup involved the following steps;

  • Forking the Wikimedia repository
  • Cloning the repository, setting up and running it on my local machine
  • Connecting my forked with upstream
  • Configuring CI.

Week two followed up with more configurations and installations of dependencies, configuring CI to work with docker, run test, etc. The configurations and setup continued into week 3, I continued with setting up and configuring Playwright, jest, etc. On the third week, my mentors and I realized that Travis CI might not be the best CI tool to use for continuous integration in evaluating playwright because of a couple of reasons;

  1. Travis CI doesn't store artifacts out of the box, it requires additional setup and configurations such as using AWS, Github pages, or any other external services to store artifacts.
  2. travis-ci.org is shutting down soon and will be migrating to travis-ci.com. So, to simplify the workflow and configurations, we decided to use Github actions as the CI pipeline for the project.

The change to using Github actions meant that I had to abandon Travis CI and move to Github actions whereby, I had to take a little bit of time to learn and get familiar with how Github actions work. Moving to Github actions has been a great idea because I'm seeing the tests and linter run much faster and we are now able to store artifacts by just adding minimal configurations. This has come with its own challenges like learning how to use GitHub actions and falling behind the project milestones and deadlines. I have struggled with a number of issues like;

  • How to work with the forked repository, updating upstream with the forked repo. There was a time when I updated the upstream with my master and immediately rebased with a feature branch, this added all the commits from upstream and messed up all my commits, we had to abandon the pull request and created a new branch. I learned from this. It has been a bit of a challenge and learning when it comes to working with a forked repo but with the help of my mentors, I'm getting past this.
  • I have had several issues with setting up and configuring jest with Microsoft playwright, but my mentors have been there to help unblock me.

All in all, I have learned so much so far within this short time and have been able to make progress with the project. I'm also putting in extra effort to ensure that I hit the project milestones in time. My mentors have been very helpful in pointing me in the right direction whenever I get stuck or have issues with the tasks I'm working on.

Written by Harriet on Dec 24 2020, 8:47 AM.
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