Open Source Student Discourse

It's the home stretch for Hacktober fest! For my final contribution, I decided to tackle my last goal , which was simply to do something fun and interesting. Once again, thanks to GitHub user vichitr and his brilliant project , I was able to quickly find something to contribute. I've always thought that programming algorithms was a good challenge and invited great learning experiences, so for my final PR, I decided to program an example of the sliding window technique in Python. The sliding window technique is a very useful algorithm that is used across many disciplines of software design. It allows users to compare subsets of data (i.e. windows) within a larger collection, in order to find significant items. Personally, I have encountered the sliding window technique during some applied research projects that I have tackled in the past. In a particular machine learning project, I used the sliding window technique to construct subsets of data that were then fed into a separa...

I'll admit it right off: this week, I did not have a lot of time to spare for Hacktoberfest, so I was unable to tackle a new goal (out of the ones I set for myself at the start of the month). Nevertheless, I did not want to jank up the weekly momentum I had by missing a contribution, so I simply opted for a simple one instead. I found a nice project , by GitHub user vichitr , that focused on encouraging amateur contributors during Hacktoberfest, not unlike the last repo I contributed to. Instead of focusing on design patterns, vichitr's project contains a variety of issues that programmers are invited to tackle. I decided to contribute to issue #6 on the repo, which is to implement a data structure in the language of your choice. Since I was short on time for the week, I decided to contribute a threaded tree by overhauling a previous project I did as a school assignment. A threaded tree is a binary search tree that supports easy, in-order traversal of its values. Normally,...

For week 2 of Hacktoberfest, I decided to do some actual coding! Github user ZoranPandovski has an absolutely amazing project that is perfect for novice contributors: simply code an example of any programming design pattern in the language of your choice! The issue can be found here , so please post to the thread if you wish to take part in this project. You can also contribute explanations about each design pattern to the repo's documentation - it's a great way to share your knowledge! Don't know what design patterns are? No worries, there are plenty of online resources to learn about them. Design patterns are a fundamental aspect of programming logic and software design, so if you really want to get serious about programming, then study up! After you've learned all you can about design patterns, why not flex your newfound skills by contributing to ZoranPandovski's project? For my contribution, I've written some very simple C++ code to demonstrate the ...

As mentioned in my last blog post , I am currently in the midst of participating in Hacktoberfest in order to deepen my understanding of open source. For my first week, I decided to start with a simple issue that I could confidently contribute to: the HackSta account's issue #12 . This issue invites other Github users to contribute customized icons for the Atom text editor (a product of Github!). It was very easy to start - users simply have to fork the repo and contribute new designs for the Atom logo in SVG format. The project has had many contributions in the past, and already has a large collection of over 500 icons, so there was lots of materials and references to work off of. The entire collection of custom Atom icons can be found on the project's website . There are entire collections of interesting variations on the default Atom logo, including palettes pulled directly from the color values of country flags and famous sports team logos. Take your pi...