Into Open Source with Khang Nguyen

Project Telescope - a web app for tracking blogs in orbit around Seneca's open source involvement - started more than a month ago has shown a lot of progress while getting contributions from many students including me working mostly in the aspect of developer experience. It is amazing to me how far we have gone with many people put in their effort a little bit here and there. Last 2 Weeks Recap Two weeks ago, I posted  about the integration of ESLint, Prettier and EditorConfig into the project and was waiting for everyone's codes to come in before I can run re-formatting on the entire codebase. Two days later, after a productive hand-on meeting with my professor, the PR landed with code styling in the entire codebase uniformed under 1 format and me learning a few useful things. The first thing I picked up during the meeting is the set up of a script to run prettier on selected code modules using npm . { " name " : " telescope " , " versi

I have been imagining that I am going to have a good blog post for the following satisfactory and unforeseen story. Initial Failure Since last week, I have been very tempted to level-up my game with the contributions I have been making to open source. I planned  to work on a project of Microsoft which turned out to be a spectacular failure for me mainly because  a)  I cannot grasp enough the complexity of the codebase to accomplish a good-enough contribution for my goal and  b)  many smaller issues were CSS modification when I was more interested in making contributions to functionality. However, that fact changed just the next day... How Gatsby and I crossed each other's path The following day, as my friends and I are staying after class, as usual, by chance, we had a conversation about how we are catching up with the heavy load of the semester and our open source contribution goal. A good friend of mine  suddenly reminded me of a conversation we had before (when my interes

Last week I mentioned project Telescope in my post about my upcoming plan for contribution to open source. It is amazing looking at it right now and see that, at this exact moment, there are 113 PRs solving 138 issues (and still counting) in the repository. I am happy to be 1 of contributors, too. My contribution is about integrating tools to uniform and enforce coding styles and practices to the project. This would solve a few current problems such as: Indentation type and size mismatch - 1 tab vs. 4 spaces and 2 spaces vs 4 spaces Newline character mismatch - Windows CRLF ( \r\n ) vs. Linux LF ( \n ) Naming convention mismatch - Camel case vs. snake case (underscore-separated) Anonymous function form mismatch - function() { } vs. () => { } Inconsistent (or bad) code formatting in general and many more... in the project to which there are a large number of developers contribute. The tools I mentioned are not completely unfamiliar in any way, they are the combination

Hacktoberfest 2019 ended leaving me waiting to receive a very cool tee and highly motivated to keep contributing to open source. Release 0.3 is coming up with me having to contribute to an internal project and an external one. 1. Project Telescope This is an internal project of DPS 909, the class of Fall 2019. The goal of this project is to build a more robust web application to replace the current Planet CDOT - a collection of blog posts in the topics of Open Source Software posted by students, professors and researchers at Seneca College - to overcome a number of issues such as obsolete technologies, crashing due to users' errors and the fact that the page is very old. Therefore, we want to rewrite the web app as an Open Source project to fix the existing issues and enhance it on a newer platform with newer technologies. The project is going to be led by the professor of DPS 909 but it is going to be a collaborative product of 50+ students in the course. Although I