Tuesday 21 February 2017

React-ing to the need for a modern MapGuide viewer (Part 13): My first* pull request

Previously, I switched our testing stack for mapguide-react-layout over to Jest, which had some positive flow-on effects, like being able to finally upgrade to Webpack 2 and being able to try out the new OpenLayers npm package, resulting in a nice reduction in production bundle size due to only pulling the bits of OpenLayers that we are actually using. Jest also has code coverage built in, and by piping its coverage output to node-coveralls, TravisCI will automatically upload said coverage reports to coveralls.io resulting in yet another shiny badge to show on our project page.

These badges are becoming like Pokemon: I just want to catch 'em all.

So the next badge for me to collect was greenkeeper. Greenkeeper is a free service that monitors your GitHub repository and keeps your node package dependencies up to date. So last night I enabled greenkeeper integration for mapguide-react-layout.

Today I got a GitHub notification for a new pull request on mapguide-react-layout. Great! I love pull requests. Except, this pull request is not from a human, it's from the greenkeeper bot (*my first non-human pull request). Looking at the pull request in detail was most amusing.


A bot (coveralls) commenting on a pull request opened by another bot (greenkeeper)!

I wonder how many pull requests out there are nothing but full of bot-on-bot comments? How deep does this bot rabbit hole go?

When bots can start writing their own code, I think that's when we can pack it in as the human race and submit to our bot overlords.

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