Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.

Hello All,

I am back to my very own space. I was hoping to write on to this page since a very long time. But yeah, if only I could have contributed earlier. But better late than never.

Choosing an organisation is a difficult task in its own. It’s like choosing a dish at a restaurent you visited for the first time with all dishes unfamilier. Choosing interest over programming language you know is like choosing taste over money.

After looking for various restaurents in the street, and after going through their menu and prices, finally settled with a restaurent named Scikit-learn, which offered taste of my interest and the money I could afford.

So, after staring at the menu for a long enough time, I decided to put my money on this. The cheapest I could find!! ;)

And yeah, the food was great, also the price. Will be sticking around here for a while at least.

Let’s dive deeper into the food I had, ohh, the issue I solved.

The title of the issue, at first, made no sense to me, to be honest. It had words like backport, assert_raises, and of course assert_raises_regex. The first comment that I made was :

Can I work on this issue? I lack deep understanding of the functions mentioned above, but I am enthusiastic about it. Thanks

I started working on it once I got a confirmation. You have to spend some time just to understand how the code works. I spent a day or two understanding the related methods, got decent help from mentors. So, here is the detail of the issue I took.

Python 3.3 came with a new feature of using msg argument in context manager, i.e. one can raise a particular error message if the assert statement fails. Example is illustrated below:

The owners thought that this feature should be there in the scikit-learn module. So, they wanted to backport this feature to Python 2.X, thus making it possible for Python 2 users to get this feature while using scikit-learn. (Looks a bit complicated, at least to me, but became clear as I spent some time on it.)

And yeah, here’s what eventually happened. A merged Pull Request. :)

Merged Pull Request

Finally, here are some tips if you are yet to start.

  1. GET GOOD AT GIT. This helps a lot. You won’t loose or mess up your progress if you are comfortable using git.

  2. Never make changes on Master branch. Always branch out to a new one using git checkout -b <branch-name> .

  3. Ask questions. The mentors will never form opinions on you. They are there to help you. Go ahead and ask. But yeah, refrain from asking questions which can be googled easily.

  4. Keep your code as clean as possible and add as less lines of code as you can while achieving your motive.

Signing off,

Kumar Ashutosh

(thechargedneutron)