Telescope: growing faster than expected

Telescope has been alive for 2 weeks, and its development couldn't get more exciting!

I mentioned in a previous post how the project seemed to be a bit chaotic at the beginning, mostly because of the number of people involved in it and the different sets of skills and experience that each contributor has.

Well, that was last week. This week, we have a very enthusiastic group of developers exchanging ideas, offering help, being passionate about their contributions, and all that with a surprising level of organization completely unexpected (at least to me) for a group this big, and we're taking about between 50 and 60 people. As I said before, it's been fascinating to watch it grow, and I couldn't be happier to be part of it.

But there's more. At a personal level, I've been able to contribute to many parts of the project, and in may different ways! Back-end, containers, documentation, testing, CI... all that in just 2 weeks! In some cases, I added features that will enhance the capabilities of the project, in others I just made small changes or suggested someone a different approach for what they were working on. It's been a very enriching experience because not only I had to review and refresh previous knowledge to be able to offer some help, but also I had to do a significant amount of self-teaching so I could take on certain issues and complete some tasks.

So far:

• I added a tool to fetch data from Github, usign GitHub's API
• Implemented tests for that tool, using mock responses
• I tweaked our .eslint a little bit
• I fixed some linting errors
• And I tried to add husky to the project, but another contributor did a way better job, so it was better for the project to prioritize his pull request over mine

Also, I reviewed other people's contributions, I collaborated with other developers to add docker to the project and write documentation about how to use it, I gave some advice about how to add tests using mock responses... and this is only the beginning! In the next 2 weeks, I'll be able to do some more work, and the best part is that even if I'm not directly involved in some part of the project, I'll be able to review or at least take a look at what others did to solve some problem and learn a lot from it. What else could I ask for?

The only downside of all this is that I got a bit too distracted and I didn't contribute to another projects, as I was hoping to. My plan was to work on a PenguinV's issue, but since I didn't, I'll try to get it done this week, and hopefully take on another PenguinV's issue next week.

As usual, good hacking and have fun!

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Telescope: A tool for tracking blogs

Have you ever heard of PlanetCDOT?

Well, PlanetCDOT "is a collection of current blog posts by students, professors, and researchers at the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technologies and related organizations around the world", and it has been around for a long time. The technology behind PlanetCDOT is Planet, "a feed aggregator application designed to collect posts from the weblogs of members of an internet community and display them on a single page", and according to the planet index page, it hasn't been updated in 13 years.

The good thing about software that hasn't been updated in more than a decade is that there's plenty if not all of the room for improvement, and now there's a project going on to create a new aggregator for PlanetCDOT.

This project is Telescope, and It's hard to describe what it is right now since what we have is a varied group of developers, with different set of skills, trying to put together a fairly complex piece of software. It started as a disjointed mess, but it's been fascinating to watch how the people involved in it started to file issues, submitting pull requests, reviewing other people's work, discussing approaches, all in a very organic and natural way,

I'm one of the lucky ones working on this project, and so far it's one of the most interesting collaborative experiences I've ever had. I must confess that I spend hours just watching the project grow, keeping track of how others review code, suggest solutions, help each other... and with watching I mean literally staring at the issue and pull request trackers to see the new additions. As I said, it's truly fascinating.

At the early stages of the project I thought I wanted to take care of .env files, using dotenv, but someone was faster than me and already solved that problem. My current intention (hopefully I'll be able to take care of this before someone else does) is to create a module that will fetch information related to a specific github repository/pull request/issue using GitHub's API. I have some experience with it, and since someone suggested that it could be a good addition to the project I thought it was a good fit for me.

I'm aware my description of Telescope is very vague, but I'd like to wait until a few more pieces get merged to the project, adding more functionality, and then I'll give more information about the features we'd like Telescope to have, and how the contributors are coming up with creative and interesting solutions.

Being part of Telescope is great, but I'd also like to work with other projects, and since my collaboration to PenguinV was welcomed, I think I'm going to try to take on another issue of theirs. This one is going to be tough!

As usual, good hacking and have fun!

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Hacktoberfest: Documentation

We're in the last week of Hacktoberfest!

So far, participating in Hacktoberfest has been great. I've been able to contribute to very different projects and work towards the goals I had set for myself.

My work on Dashboard allowed me to improve my web skills (not as much as I'd have liked, but still) and collaborate in a project that has been around for some time. It's not a big project, but it's a very interesting one because of all the different components that it has and how useful it is for the people involved in it.

PenguinV was my chance to collaborate in a project that I really like, and also a great opportunity to face a real, scary challenge. Having to contribute using OpenCL, something I wasn't familiar with at all before, was one of those things than can easily make you think that you shouldn't be in this field.

For my last contribution, I wanted to work on PenguinV again, but since we're at the end of the month and the PenguinV community hasn't responded (yet) when I told them that I wanted to work on some issues, I decided to look around to see if I could find some other interesting projects.

And I found ImCompressor. ImCompressor is an image processor that works with lossy and lossless compression. What I found interesting about this project is the fact that it's a very young one. A small group of developers started it a month ago. All my other contributions during Hacktoberfest were related to bigger projects that have been around for a while, so I thought it could be interesting to contribute to a young project and maybe become a core part of it. 

When I found the project, they were getting ready to release version 0.8, so since there wasn't much that I could offer (remember, it's a very young project), I mentioned to the team that my first language is Spanish and that I could add a Spanish translation. They welcomed the idea, and I thought it was a good way to introduce myself, getting familiar with the project, and keep an eye on new issues popping up so I could work on them and become a main contributor.

Oh, before I forget, when I started the translation I realized the ImCompressor team uses Poedit, a cross-platform, open source, translation editor. Another interesting project, I also want to keep an eye on it and maybe see if I can contribute to it in the future.

I like ImCompressor. I've had issues with lossless JPEGS in the past, and I think this project could help many people. I hope it won't turn out to be one of those many projects that dies a few months after being born.

Well, and that's all for this month. As I said in another post, I really want Hacktoberfest to become a yearly tradition, but not the only excuse to keep collaborating with open source projects.

As usual, good hacking and have fun!

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Hacktoberfest: enhancement

We're in week 2 of Hacktoberfest, and things are going well so far.

After submitting my pull request for Dashboard, I was planning to start working on home-assistant, as I mentioned in my previous post, but it seems that the only way to get their development environment to work is using docker. I've used docker before, in fact, I've had epic battles with docker over iptables, so I decided that I was going to try something else.

That something else is penguinV, "a simple and fast C++ image processing library focus on heterogeneous systems. The library is designed with an idea to have simple common API for CPUs and GPUs simplifying developer's work on context switching between devices".

I was very excited about working on this project because it was the perfect opportunity for me the get familiar enough with its code so I can start contributing to it in a regular basis soon. I chose this issue because it seemed both challenging and doable. I wanted to work on something "real", not related to documentation or fixing syntax, but at the same time, something not too overwhelming so I wouldn't be able to finish it.

The issue was about implementing something that would compare 2 images. Sounds easy, right? Well, yes and no. I've done image processing before, things like loading images from disk without using libraries, implementing  alpha blending, rotation and inversion... but for this issue I had to work with OpenCL, and that was the challenging part. OpenCL uses parallel computing and run-time compilation, and yes, for someone who's not a very experienced programmer and has never used OpenCL before, it is as scary as it sounds.

I was very lucky that the penguinV community is very active, and as soon as a I had questions they put me in the right direction to be able to complete the task. I submitted my pull request and I made some minor changes requested by the reviewer.

This was an amazing experience. I would really like to keep contributing to penguinV and I'll probably use it in my current projects.

So, home-assistant next week? We'll see.

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Hacktoberfest: good first issue

It's Hacktoberfest time!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm very excited about Hacktoberfest, not only because I'll be able to contribute to some cool open source project, but also because I'll have the chance to improve  and test my skills, and maybe try to take on some scary project that will force me to learn and get familiar with new technologies.

My intention was to work on some issues that I found interesting and relevant for the type of skills that I'd like to develop, and also getting familiar with some interesting projects.

Unfortunately, things rarely go the way you want in software development, so I had to come up with a plan B for my very first Hacktoberfest issue.

At first, I wanted to work on an issue in the home-assistant project, but I had some problems setting up the development environment, and since they haven't replied yet, I thought I could work on something else while I wait for their advice.

Since I was running out of time, and all the other issues that I wanted to work on require more than a couple of days of coding, I turned to a project that I've worked on before, knowing that I could find some interesting issues that I could fix within the available time that I had.

This project is Dashboard, maintained by CDOT's RAs.

Dashboard project (running in debug mode with fake data)

Dashboard displays information about the projects that are currently in development at CDOT, along with some infrastructure information and scheduled events. It populates some of the panels with data fetched from Github using Github's API.
For the PR Reminder panel (WIP) and the Help Wanted panel (coming soon), it was necessary to filter some of the data fetched from Github's API so the only issues and pull requests used to populate those 2 panels would be the ones with the appropriate labels. The issue that I worked on specifically requested filtering out issues that didn't have the Help Wanted label and also making sure that all the used issues included a priority label so they could be appropriately sorted.

It was a quick fix, but a very important one since the Help Wanted panel will be up soon (that's another issue I'd like to work on for Hacktoberfest), and all the RAs at CDOT will be able to have updated and sorted information about issues that might need help (hence the Help Wanted label) and/or pull requests that need review.

Hopefully, I'll be able to work on home-assistant's issue next week, but if I can't, I might take on a penguinV's issue that will help me get familiar with their code base and maybe I'll be able to contribute more in the future.

So, good hacking and have fun!

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Hacktoberfest!

Hacktoberfest is around the corner, and as a software developer interested in open source, it’s a very exciting time!

It’s my first time participating in Hacktoberfest, I have no idea about how it’s going to be like or the type of work that I’ll be doing. Whatever happens, I have 2 clear goals that I’ll try to accomplish: improving my web development skills and facing a scary challenge.

I’ve been a developer for some time now, but because of the circumstances of the work I had to do, I didn’t have a chance to develop my web skills as much as I would’ve like to. Since the web is the future, I think having a solid knowledge of web technologies is crucial to be part of the software development community, and collaborating in a project heavily web-based will help me acquire the necessary knowledge to start feeling comfortable with web technologies. Also, I’ve been lucky (or “lucky”) so far because all the projects that I’ve been involved with were accessible in one way or another. With accessible, I mean that I was able to adapt to them, learning and developing the necessary skills to be able to contribute to them. Hacktoberfest gives me the chance to try to find something potentially scary that will require the best of my abilities to succeed. I don’t know if I’ll be able to overcome a real scary challenge, but I think facing one is something that every developer should go through every now and then.

These are the issues that I’d like to address:

There’s a project started and maintained by CDOT RA’s called Dahsboard that has been in development for some time, and it has a fair amount of issues related to web technologies that would definitely help me improve my react skills (I’ve never done anything in react before).

From that project, I want to take on these 2 issues: Pull Request reminder and Coding Style Standards.

Another interesting project that I’d like to work on is PenguinV. As their creators describe it, "PenguinV is a simple and fast C++ image processing library with focus on heterogeneous systems." The issue I’d like to work on is not particularly exciting, but I think it’s going to help me get familiar with the code and eventually start trying to take on more relevant issues and really contribute to the project.

Wish me luck!

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