Time for a short status update on my work on the openstreetmap-website codebase. It’s been a few months since I started refactoring the tests and the work rumbles on. A few of my recent coding opportunities have been taken up with other projects, including the blogs aggregator, the 2017 budget for the OSMF Operations Working Group (OWG), and the new OWG website.

With the fixtures refactoring I’ve already tackled the low-hanging fruit. So now I’m forced to tackle the big one – converting the Users fixtures. The User model is unsurprisingly used in most tests for the website, so the conversion is quite time-consuming and I’ve had to break this down into multiple stages. However, when this bit of the work is complete most future Pull Requests on other topics can be submitted without having to use any fixtures at all. The nodes/ways/relations tests will then be the main thing remaining for conversion, but since the code that deals with those changes infrequently, it’s best to work on the User factories first.

As I’ve been working on replacing the fixtures, I’ve come across a bunch of other things I want to change. But before tackling all that I’m going to mix it around a bit. My goal is to alternate between the work I think is the most important, and also helping other developers with their own work. We have around 40 outstanding pull requests and some need a hand to complete. There are plenty of straightforward coding fixes among the 250 open issues that I can work on too. I hope that if more of the issues and particularly the pull requests are completed, this will motivate some more people to get involved in development.

If you have any thoughts on what I should be prioritising – particularly if you’ve got an outstanding pull request of your own – then let me know in the comments!