Week 2: Pull Requests, Rejected Code, and the Art of Not Breaking Things

GSoC 2026 | CircuitVerse × Canvas LMS LTI 1.3 Integration If Week 1 was about getting familiar with the codebase and understanding what needed to be built, Week 2 was about learning the hard way that writing code is only half the job. The other half — the messier, more humbling half — is getting that code accepted by the people who actually maintain the project. This week was full of detours, rejected pull requests, reviewer feedback that stung a little, and a surprisingly frustrating fight with a two-letter word in Ruby. But by the end of it, I had something real to show: a clean, reviewed, and submitted change to CircuitVerse that lays the foundation for the entire LTI 1.3 integration. Let me walk you through it. A Quick Refresher: What Are We Building? CircuitVerse is an open-source platform where students can build and simulate digital circuits right in their browser. The project I'm working on aims to connect CircuitVerse with Canvas, one of the most widely used Learning Management Systems (LMS) in universities around the world. The technology that makes this connection possible is called LTI — Learning Tools Interoperability. Think of it as a universal plug that lets any educational tool (like CircuitVerse) slot into any LMS (like Canvas) so that students can log in once, get assignments, submit work, and have their grades flow back automatically — all without leaving their course page. There are two versions of this plug: LTI 1.1 , which is old and uses a simpler (but outdated) security mechanism, and LTI 1.3 , which is newer, more secure, and what Canvas actually recommends today. My job is to bring CircuitVerse fully up to LTI 1.3 standards. Monday–Tuesday: A Pull Request That Taught Me to Read Diffs I started the week with what I thought was a solid pull request (PR) — a fix for a bug in CircuitVerse's existing LTI 1.1 grade passback feature. "Grade passback" is the process where CircuitVerse sends a student's score back to Canvas after they complete an as