Hacktoberfest

Being involved in the open source community, I learned of a big "hackaton" that happens every year. For those of you who are following along my journey, this famous hackaton - labelled Hacktoberfest -  begins next week and ends the end of October. 

Personal Goals

During the month of October, I aspire to work on web application frameworks such as React, Angular 2, GraphQL as well as help the community and colleagues who are starting their journey in open source as well.

Having worked with AngularJS during my internships and co-op position I am intrigued to find how Angular 2 has improved in comparison to AngularJS by contributing to already existing angular repositories that need to fix issues. I understand that in the open source community, your pull request is not always accepted, thus, I feel as long as I can solve the issue/bug-fix, I have progressed. The more bugs I am able to fix the more I have progressed in my journey in open source.

Similarly, the reasons I chose React, is to broaden my knowledge of web frameworks, and will continue to measure my progression in React, as I would with Angular. However, one issue that I am currently weary but excited to work on is learning new way of writing APIs using GraphQL.

So far I've noticed that this is vastly different than writing a REST API, as it utilizes an object oriented approach with Javascript. Although GraphQL was released late 2018, a lot of startups and companies are already looking for developers that are familiar with it; therefore this is a great way for me to learn a new API language. 

Before moving on to the issues portion of this blog topic, I'd be updating my viewers on my progress in open source community during the month of October by posting screenshots, similar to the one below. 

Hacktober Issues

The website itself has a link to multiple websites and Github repositories that have proved very helpful for people who are just beginning their journey into open source. Of all the websites listed, my favorite was Up For Grabs, here you have the option of searching for whatever language you prefer, and it'll populate the list with repositories and issues that are labelled as that. In my case, I searched for issues pertaining to Angular 2, React, and GraphQL. Of all the issues listed, I chose to work on the following for Hacktoberfest:

• Long-interaction names cannot be seen 
• This issue requires the developer to fix an issue with truncation of text that is longer than 30 characters. This sounded intriguing to me, because I always wondered how is it that certain texts don't show up, thus I'm going to fork this repository and try and debug it. 
• CSS changes for Angular
• Part of every website or web-app is also designing the aesthetics, that's why I chose this project. The issue asks for manual IP entry or select from a pre-defined IP addresses to connect to. To do this, I must read more about angular's capability to separate and parse numbers based on delimiters.
• Homepage Icon addition
• This is a simple task that I picked up for a first-issue, simply because it'll familiarize me more with pull requests and git commands while simultaneously being able to work with React web application. To familiarize myself more with git commands, I'll look up videos tutorials as well lecture notes.

Looking forward to Hacktober!! See you all next week!