Biff Pair Programming #1


This is the first in a series of Biff Pair Programming Sessions®, in which we tackle an issue in an open-source Biff project for the sake of education, camaraderie, and glory.

Jeremy Taylor drove in today's pair session, and he fixed a bug in Platypub where users would get an Internal Server Error if they tried to create a new site or newsletter without first adding API keys for Netlify or Mailgun, respectively (issue #19).

  • 0:00 – Introduction
  • 3:50 – Running Platypub
  • 9:00 – Selecting an issue: showing a better error message if you haven't set API keys
  • 11:00 – Start coding
  • 15:00 – Tangent: how one should access the system map
  • 19:00 – Resume coding
  • 22:05 – Doing a system refresh. I think we screwed something up here because we had to restart the JVM before eval-ing worked again.
  • 32:05 – Start working on an error message
  • 34:18 – Jeremy has a burst of insight and realizes we can just disable the button instead of showing an error message after the fact
  • 40:45 – "New newsletter" button is now disabled properly, now we do the same for "New site"
  • 41:50 – You can hear my wife in the background
  • 43:30 – Throw in a little CSS
  • 47:40 – Victory is ours. Jeremy submits the pull request.

The next session is scheduled for July 21st at 16:30 UTC.

Published by Jacob O'Bryant on 7 Jul 2022

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