It is the third week of the outreachy and the topic for the blog is everybody struggles.

Developers deal with technical problems all day long and you learn very fast that not only do you need to have different problem-solving skills but that it’s also just as important to know when you need to ask for help.

“ Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new.” ~ Barack Obama

My work in Git is to accelerate rename detection so that merging of two branches becomes faster But now Elijah Newren is working on a new merge-ort facility and he says that rename detection is no longer the rate determining step in most cases. So this week I had to work on making the performance tests to benchmark the merge-ort and to search for some special cases where accelerating rename detection can help but I feel that I spoiled the whole week because of a silly mistake caused by the OS and after three weeks I don’t even have a single line of code merged to the Git codebase. (Well I am working on having my first patch merged, it is left on some reviews)

Speaking about the silly mistake, I had a basic performance test failing on my OS X. Initially I thought that there was some mistake with cloning the repository or my setup etc and I checked thoroughly for all the things but nothing worked. After discussions with mentors, it came out that it wasn’t because of my setup, it was a general mac os issue which caused the basic test to fail. There is a function called test_export() which wasn’t able to export a variable. This was because the macOS uses the BSD version of sed, which differs in many respects from the GNU sed version that comes with Linux distros. There was a solution in almost 3-4 hours on adding that issue to the mailing list.

So now I can finally start writing the code to benchmark the merge-ort.