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Showing posts from September, 2019

Hacktoberfest - My First of Many Open Source Events

After establishing a basic foundation in open-source concepts and skills, I eagerly look forward to participating in Hacktoberfest this upcoming October, and hopefully many more to come. Hacktoberfest is hosted by Digital Ocean and it is a month long event that runs throughout the month of October and encourages contributions to a variety of projects. It is highly accessible and welcoming to individuals across all regions and skill levels globally, which is great news since I still consider myself a beginner as an open-source developer. On top of all this, they also offer the prize of a Hacktoberfest shirt for registered users that successfully complete 4 or more pull requests. After reading through all the information on the Hacktoberfest website, I proceeded to set two goals and find three issues I would like to tackle. Here are the goals I set for this event: 1 . Get involved in a project that you find interesting As a student, its often difficult to pursue personal pr

My First Contributions and Collaborations in Open-Source

This week I continued my journey into the world of open source by contributing to the work of others, as well as accepting contributions from others for my Micro-Note web app detailed in the previous blog post . I was able to contribute one bug fix, and one additional feature to similar applications built by other students. This was done by utilizing Git features such as posting issues, forking repositories, creating new branches, and creating/receiving pull requests. Details of my contributions are explained below. In addition to these, I also received my first pull request to review nad merge another students contributions to my own application. Fixing Another Students Bug One of my colleagues ( dbeigi ) built a note taking application called " whiteboard " that allows users to save their notes using hotkey inputs, otherwise the application is meant to automatically save the users work every 4 seconds. While I was reviewing the code, I noticed the paramter in the setInt

Micro-Note : My First Steps into Open Source

I just finished building Micro-Note, a simple web based note taking application. While it is not the most innovative app, it marks my first steps into the world of open source. Not only was I able to learn and exercise essential Git skills including the creation and operation of a repo, but also brush up on my web development basics. This involved both features found on the GitHub web app, and the Git command line interface. I found this highly useful as I am aware Git will be a part of my career moving forward, whether it be for open source or other ventures as a developer. The app is simple and fairly self explanatory.  It allows the user to input notes into the web page and save them to continue or edit them later if needed. It is built with the standard web stack, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. It uses the  FilerJS Browser Filesystem library to save the user input to a local file so the user can save and resume their note-taking at later time.  This was helpful as it allowed me to b

Building Native Mobile Apps with React-Native

What is React-Native? React-Native is an open-source mobile application development framework created by Facebook, the same organizations who created the robust ReactJS library which one of the top front-end web development frameworks. React-Native is written in JavaScript which makes it inviting for any web developers looking into mobile application development. It is also syntactically similar to ReactJS making it a great option for web developers transitioning to mobile application development since it would mitigate the learning curve associated. React-Native is also based in on the component oriented architecture that all modern web development frameworks such as Angular, VueJs, and ReactJS employ, which also minimizes the learning curve. Aside from having an inviting premise for web developers, one of the biggest benefits it offers is the ability to develop native mobile applications for multiple platforms (iOS and Android) with a single code base. This makes it a highly