Mastering Open Source (Week 13 @ Encora Academy)
It’s been three months since I entered the Encora/Nearsoft Academy. I have learned a lot these months, and it’s significantly apparent how things that I was unfamiliar with, now it’s easier for me to figure out what’s going on.
One of those things is the world of Open Source. In the beginning, I was scared by the idea of my trying to understand how it works. I started watching a lot of videos and reading blogs about it until I finally got started…
I noticed that the process was easier than I thought and the first thing that I’ve done was to get my hands dirty, find a project, find an issue, and work right away on it.
This worked for me the second week when I was choosing projects in Python, a language in which I feel more comfortable working.
But, since I have to make contributions in two different stacks, I found JS a language so fascinating, so I would like to go deeper in my knowledge of it. I tried to follow my first approach instead of actually get to work. I lost myself looking for more information about JS projects, which didn’t go well…
Then. This week I decided to get into an issue and work on it as soon as I find one.
I found my first issue in a project called Chart.js, a JS library for data visualization. I had to solve a little bug that when you enter a negative radius for an arc drawer, the code couldn’t handle it and threw an error.
Then, I found another issue in Open Desk, a project for helping organizations to optimize office desk utilization, where I had to fix some problems with the UI.
The Figma design wasn’t the same as the one in the project, so I fixed the scroll bar, the icons, fonts, shadows, clicking outside element events and, so on.
Working on this project allowed me to use tools that I’ve never had used before. These tools were React, and Material UI, both for working on the Front-End side.
I actually enjoyed a lot of Material UI, I learned about wrappers, HOC, hooks, and how you apply styles among its wrappers. It’s an awesome project!
Conclusion
For both of my projects, I got my PR’s merged. I’m just waiting on them to close the issues… I noticed that I feel comfier than I was expecting to work in the Front-End since it’s more straightforward to see what’s going on. Maybe I need to get into more JS projects to understand it better.
Links of the GitHub repos that I’ve contributed in:
