Release 0.4.1 - Planning my life (for the next 2 weeks)

 What's going on good people?!?!?!

These next couple of weeks are super busy for me so I will be making this one short, unlike the last blog post I made.

So this past week in our open source class we were tasked with picking an issue(s) that would need to be solved and PR(s) submitted for 0.4 at the end of the semester.

This post will be to describe my planning process/ thoughts on what I would like to do over the next couple of weeks. I thought I would try and keep it simple and go back to a project that I have worked and made PRs for in past releases 0.2/3. 

I will be going back to automating the web social media platform of Whatsapp. This will be the repo I will be picking my issues (i.e. issue# 1, 2,**Might change depending if I get them assigned, or if I find more interesting ones**) from. I see a couple of issues that have been stale (no progress being made) for a while now. I would like to work on them so that the maintainer/contributors could add more features and move on. Pretty much all the issues are linked together in terms of usability with one another.

Well, That is pretty much it for this one. I will be starting to work on the issues once I finish my course work for GAM531/537 (sigh... #ThanksGeorge)

Till next time, 
XOXO,
Gossip Plamen

Release 0.3.1 - The Seneca Hubble Telescope

 

Hello once again today.

I will just get to the point of this blog.

So Professor Humphrey gave us release 0.3, 2 weeks ago (I think), I've sort of lost track of time. This 0.3 release was to contribute to two more repos.

The first being a contribution to the Telescope repo.

Telescope is an open source web server and client application for aggregating and presenting a timeline of Seneca's open source blogs. Telescope makes it easy to see what's happening with open source at Seneca right now.

So the first thing I had to do was to find a Telescope issue that I can actually do...

My JavaScript really sucks major donkey balls. So I looked and looked through the hundreds of issues (at the time) that had been filed and stopped at the perfect one for a front end bug that had re-occurred due to a commit changing the flow of how posts are being handled.

I got down to business and started hunting down the culprit CSS that was responsible for not making the posts on mobile not extend the whole screen width. In all hind sight I probably spent a lot more time than required for something like this because as mentioned above, my JS is horrible. It also doesn't help that I am not a big fan/ have much interest of web technologies.

Anyways,

The problem that was at hand was that because of commit #1174 and soon after #1217 the content was not being displayed properly as maintainers/ alumni want.

As I said I hunted down the culprit and found that the default CSS style was not being overridden. I simply applied the style so that it will be used and everything worked according to plan.

Although, this was not a huge fix. I learned a lot about collaboration on a big project and the multiple checks that have to be conducted before something is merged and eventually deployed. 

My PR actually fixed two issues at the same time, the second being by accident but that is not important O.o

These were the results of my small bug fix.

                      Before:                                                  After:

                                 

Oh and the search page issue (linked above)

I was pretty happy with the changes and how it turned out.

Well that is everything for now.

Till next time, 

XOXO, 

Gossip Plamen

Season 1 - Hacktoberfest Recap

 

WHAT A RUSH!

A race against time and other open source devs to qualify for open issues on repositories you are interested in.

What a great past time activity that is also accredited for school. 

Hacktoberfest! What a great idea. Especially in these interesting and difficult times.

It has finally ended. The busiest month I have ever lived through. It was not that bad to be honest. I have gotten through a lot worse (I think). 

Welp, this blog will serve as a recap to the most interesting event I have participated in, Hacktoberfest. The point of Release 0.2 was to contribute to at least 3 different repos and make 4 different PRs. 

What a great experience to gain knowledge in different projects and languages... UGH Python. 

Without further adu, Season 1 Recap of my Hacktoberfest journey.

Release 0.2.1 - Entry into Open Source

To get into the swing of Open Source contributions, I wanted to start off with something small. The first repository I chose was of a website that I had used on occasion to keep up with VR news when I first bought my Oculus Quest HMD. Unfortunately, I found a more intriguing website that contained more up-to-date information and game release/news. My first PR was to locate a script that was returning a status code 404. This was not that hard, like at all (thanks chrome dev tools). I made an issue on the repo and created a PR that had simply commented out the script returning a 404, which was doing nothing anyways. I think the maintainer does not check his github often since the issue and PR still remain open, Oh well.

Release 0.2.2 - Entering Another (Virtual) Reality

This was by far the most exciting repo I worked on throughout the whole month. I love virtual reality and I am really glad I got to contribute to this repo because the whole idea behind it is very neat. Oculus Quest is a standalone headset and has no connection to your PC. This owner of the project created a link to your HMD and PC through your LAN so that the Quest can communicate with discord and update your "discord presence", or simply put what game you are playing at the moment. I felt really accomplished with this PR because, I was finally doing something I have a passion for. I made a PR to update his JSON file which contained all sorts of applications and games. I even chatted with "MadMagic" on discord and we are now friends and talk regularly.

Release 0.2.3 - Avoiding Boring People with Chat Automation

My third PR was actually two smaller PRs. Why two? Well, because I didn't think it was enough for the fixes I made on the first one. I found this really neat repository that was basically a chat automation bot for the whatsapp web-based platform. The chatbot did everything you could imagine a chatbot doing. The maintainer was looking for a small refactor on his code by including a different style of CSS selectors from calling his constant selector class file. I replaced the selectors the way he wanted and got acquainted a little more with python, my arch nemesis. For the second PR of my third PR I had to basically copy the basic logic of his whatsapp bot, but make slight modifications so that a facebook session is made (click link above for more details).

Release 0.2.4 - More Pythonic Automation

This was yet another contribution towards automation bots. However this was tailored only to scraping elements from the whatsapp web-based platform. The maintainer (Navpreet) wanted me to write a function to scrape and return a phone number of a specific person that the user has an existing chat with. Really neat and as it turns out not that easy. It was interesting seeing how code varies from machine to machine. A problem I encountered was that the code ran fine on my machine and did the intended task, but once Navpreet ran it on his end it gave him an error (see blog for more details).

That was it for the month. Overall the experience was amazing and I will definately participate in next years Hacktoberfest. I really enjoyed getting involved in various projects and most importantly I made friends and (Hopefully) connections by interacting with the project maintainers. There are a lot of people that are like minded and have the same cores and interests as I do, no matter where in the world they are. a big thank you to my professor for picking something so interesting to get us involved. 

Oh and I made my 4 + 1 Hacktoberfest accepted PRs even though 2 of the PRs I made for Release 0.2 were not in hacktoberfest repos.

Now, all that is left is to wait for the PRs to mature and for me to get a sweet T-shirt. 

That was everything that happened during Season 1, stay tuned for Season 2 of my hacktoberfest journey next year around the same time... obviously for hacktoberfest.

Till next time, 

XOXO, 

Gossip Plamen

Release 0.2.1 Entry into Open Source

 

OMG!

It's finally happening, DO NOT PANIC!

October is finally upon us and Hacktoberfest has officially started. What an amazing experience to get involved with other developers across the globe and contribute something meaningful.

So, anyway. For the month of October we have to make 4 PRs in at least 3 different repos. I loved the idea of getting involved with something and transitioning outside of my comfort zone.

Roughly a year ago I bought myself an Oculus Quest (Best purchase I ever made). I entered into a whole new reality (literally). Accompanying this new purchase I developed a new hobby. A hobby for VR, Virtual Reality, and as every new hobby I was, still am, really interested in all news and things in regards to VR. When I was still a "newby" in the VR scene I started following all these cool websites and forums to maximize the gain of my new toy.

Therefore, it only made sense that my first PR to someone outside of our OSD class was to an Oculus Quest related repo.

I began my search for repos related to Oculus in general but the projects seemed way too big and out of my scope (at least for this week). After hours of searching and going through countless of README files. I found the ONE.

The repo I found was for a website I used to follow and get my gaming information from when I first bought my Oculus Quest.

The website itself looked amazing, for it having been done by one person.

It was time to begin looking through the code and finding potential bugs. I remember our professor showing us how to find bugs in one of his lectures. My initial urge was to open up the developer inspection tool on chrome and see if any links are broken.

To my avail there was a script that was returning a status code of 404.

I looked over the code to see if the flipclock.js was being used anywhere that was of importance. YES! It was not. I proceeded to make an issue notifying the owner. 

Short and sweet. That was my fix.

I made a quick PR where I simply commented out the js file incase he wanted to have it in his code for future reference.

AND THAT'S A WRAP.

It was not much but fixing a bug does not have to be a complicated thing. With that being said, I do have a much bigger contribution coming to another Oculus Quest Repo coming up. So stay tuned my peeps.

Till next time,

XOXO,

Gossip Plamen