Open Source Student Discourse

It's that time of year; the mornings are getting chilly, the leaves are turning, the pumpkin spice is flowing, and open source developers are getting all worked up over something called Hacktoberfest . Not to be confused with the other , similar-sounding (though arguably no less beer-filled) celebration, Hacktoberfest is a chance for open source enthusiast to truly flex their projects and contributions. Hosted by DigitalOcean , Hacktoberfest 2019 is an event running throughout the month of October that encourages activity in the open source community. It is completely free to sign up, and participants can even link their Github accounts to use as their Hacktoberfest profiles. As you may have already guessed, I will be participating in this event as my next major milestone on my journey into the world of open source. Through the miracle of APIs, even my profile picture was imported! While the prospect of diving headfirst into such a large, open source event as a beginner may s...

Hello friends, welcome back to my journey into the world of open source. Continuing from the last milestone (in which we explored pushing a simple app to Github), this time I begin to scratch the surface of a major aspect of open source - community contributions. For the Release 0.1 deliverable, I work alongside my fellow classmates from the DPS909 course, as we work to review and bugfix each other's work. For reference, we all created the same, simple note-taking app, but each programmer's individual preferences resulted in slightly different designs with unique source code. According to proper Github etiquette, users wishing to contribute to a project should first fork a version of the repo to their own Github account. Then, a separate branch of the repo should be made to specifically address the contribution being made. After the changes are implemented, a formal pull request should be submitted to the official project repo, so that it can be reviewed by the original auth...

Once again, I am continuing my journey to become a full-fledged member of the open source community. For this small milestone, I am practicing the creation and management of a Github repo using git bash on my local machine. For test material, I have created an incredibly simple, browser-based sticky note app, appropriately called Simple Noter. For those interested, the final product is hosted on Github Pages, and can be found here: https://jerryshueh.github.io/simple-noter/ The app itself is very basic - simply type a note into the text space and hit CTRL + X to save. Your note will be saved between sessions until you clear your browser's local data. It uses a number of open source and free-to-use resources, such as Kenny Wong's Hotkeys.js , and Google Fonts. By the way, something I've learned is that all Google Fonts are distributed under the SIL Open Font License, which allows anyone to use and modify them for personal or commercial purposes. As for the learning proce...

The WebGL Fluid Simulator is a small application that allows the user to play with simulated fluids right in their browser, and works on both PCs and mobile devices. The visual effects follow proper fluid dynamics, and can be manipulated in real time by pointing and click, as well as several available options such as quality, density, and velocity.  The app is written in JavaScript, and as the name suggests, visually renders its effects using WebGL. It was created by Github user PavelDoGreat based off another Github project:  Fluids-2D , and is distributed under the MIT license. As of September 8th, 2019, WebGL Fluid Simulator is trending with 2,307 stars during the month, and 6,070 stars in total. Main interface of WebGL Fluid Simulator by Github user PavelDoGreat I was interested in investigating this project as it demonstrates the breadth of open source resources on Github. Users can find projects that range from complex systems and APIs, to small plug-ins and simpl...