What to do when your PR fails

Yesterday, I decided to make some "quick" changes to the OpenSauced docs site. Now, I know that "quick changes" is essentially a bad word in tech. Anytime you say it, it will indeed not be quick. I wrote up a

There are two things that should clue us into the mistake I made here:

1. The sidebar doesn't use the title we designated.


2. We see all the frontmatter at the top, and we shouldn't.

I added the --- back in and it fixed the first problem.

But even though we ran things locally and double-checked our work visually, made the updates, and pushed them live, we're still seeing errors.

On to the next check: Compliance.

Compliance

At OpenSauced, we make sure that each PR follows compliance checks run by a GitHub Action. This , which requires a specific naming convention. This means that each PR title should be preceded by a type and colon. For example, feat: Add User Login. If you don't follow the conventions, this part of the PR will fail and will be indicated.

When I scroll to the bottom of my PR, I can see more information about where my PR has failed. In this case, we can see the red early.

Now, let's click the link in "Please check the logs."

Next, we'll see this screen:

Finally! Now, we just need to spend a little time looking through the messages. I'm going to give you a second to look at the error message and see if you can figure it out.

🤔

🤔

🤔

🤔

🤔

If you said that the links are broken, then you're right! When I reorganized the documentation, I forgot that I also needed to update the links to the new sections. A couple of changes to this, and we're ready to go.

Some of these are things that you might already know, but maybe you've never gone through the process of checking deploy logs or aren't sure how to approach fixing a broken PR. Here's the thing, it used to make me super uncomfortable to see all that red and to feel like I did something wrong. I made some mistakes here, but nothing that isn't fixable. And getting used to the process of not getting it right the first time is an important skill in tech. You refine your process and you get more efficient. So, next time you see that red ❌, don't panic. Think of it as an opportunity to learn and a reminder for what you can do next time.