Open Source collaboration at its best

Remember mininote? It’s that small app that we made last week. It’s also part of an assignment for an Open Source course that I’m taking.
So, what about miniNote? Well, since we’re here to talk about Open Source, miniNote is the perfect excuse to show how an Open Source project grows thanks to a community of people who want to help improve software and make the world a better place.

As part of the Open Source course, we all (my classmates and I) had to create a miniNote, and the best part is that now we also got to check each other’s projects and fix bugs or add features to them.

I worked on 3 different projects:

Grommers00/my-note

my-note had a very minor issue that I wanted to address. The script tag was located at the beginning of the body tag in the html document, and I thought it was a good idea to move it to the end of the body.

It’s a minor bug, but depending on the size of the html document, a script tag in the wrong place can give the perception of a slow, bloated website.


jerryshueh/simple-note

For simple-note, I thought adding a save-on-disk functionality would be a good addition. Simple-note already had a saving functionality (not in a file) that uses ‘ctrl+x’ to save, so I added ‘ctrl+s’ as the shortcut to save on disk. It was an interesting addition since it was my first time using ‘FileSaver.js’.


Cindyledev/my-note

For this assignment, I was supposed to collaborate with 2 projects, but after finishing my 2 contributions, I started looking around because I was curious about other people’s contributions and how our apps were getting better thanks to mere collaboration. Checking my-note’s issues, I saw that one of the issues was filed by the creator of the project, not by a classmate trying to fix a bug or add a feature. In this case, it was a “real“ issue that was preventing the creator of the project from finishing the app and continue with the assignment. A fellow programmer stuck with a piece of code in an Open Source project. Say no more.

The issue was that the saving functionality wasn’t working, and the app wouldn’t show saved notes after refreshing. I did some testing and switching ‘querySelector()’ to ‘getElementById()’ seemed to fix the problem.

One mistake I made in this one is that I added the meta charset to the html document as part of this issue instead of opening a new one. I don’t think it’s a big deal (in this case), but I should be careful in the future because a contribution done through the wrong issue is almost untraceable, and if it creates a bug, it will be a huge headache for whoever has to deal with it.


I think we could call this part of the assignment pure Open Source collaboration at its best. A group of people helping each other improve their software by fixing bugs and adding features. Isn’t it amazing and exciting? No? Well, I think it is.