Visualizing pull request merge cadence

This summer I had the pleasure to mentor Martin Nečas, a talented student from Střední průmyslová škola Brno, Purkyňova (a high school in Brno, CZ).
Martin has so many interests and wishes to learn everything that he can, and delivers on doing so, what makes me appreciate his eagerness for knowledge.

His summer internship project at Red Hat was to enable developers to visualize the time it takes to merge Pull Requests in GitHub repositories. In particular, we intended to use that to understand the healthiness of the merge processes in OpenShift-related repositories, and to serve as a guide to gauge the effects of changes to the said processes.

http://martin.codingkwoon.com/openshift/origin/

It all started back in early May, and in the first weeks Martin took the time to learn about OpenShift, containers, Linux and Python. He has been using Fedora on his laptop since then, and I know he really enjoys it, specially when he discovers new ways of doing things in the command line.

Due to my time constraints, it was only in June 1 when we started discussing his project in more detail. He was quick to grasp the idea and kept coming back with working prototypes. At first he was sold on learning Go, but then decided to stick with Python and Django and leverage his pre-existing skills.

His open source project GithubGraphs can be seen live at http://martin.codingkwoon.com, it is a web application that communicates with GitHub through its GraphQL API to fetch data about PRs and stores it locally to generate interactive visualizations. It is worth noting Martin's ability to play with the GitHub v3 REST API, and then, once he realized the downsides of using it, learning about GraphQL and using it effectively to improve the performance of the project.

This project also let Martin write much more JavaScript code than he has ever written before! And he did it well. Through several iterations, collecting feedback from different sources, he got to a good looking and functional design, well done!

In August, Martin reached out to OpenShift developers to announce his project publicly and get feedback. The reception was positive. Now I wish the original goals of the project will be fulfilled.

As we wrap up our collaboration, Martin is looking for new projects and more exciting times at Red Hat. Good luck!


Martin's GitHub profile: https://github.com/ocasek
Martin's blog: http://mnecas.blogspot.cz/