Open Source Student Discourse

Last week , I talked about my external contribution and the trouble I had with setup. This week, I performed my contribution to our internal project: Seneca Telescope . I wanted to work on an aspect of the project that I had not dabbled in before, so I chose to restructure some code in order to create fixtures. So here's a quick recap of the work I did for this week's release 0.4 contribution. Internal Contribution - Adding Fixtures to Telescope In this context, fixtures refers to elements in a software project that are used to create a reproducible testing environment. In the case of project Telescope, there are certain components of the web app that parse RSS and Atom feed URLs in order to derive the contents of a blog. In order to test these components, we created a "dummy" blog account that produced a very specific feed output when parsed. Since we know what output to anticipate, we can use the dummy blog to test the various parsing components of Telescope. ...

External Contribution This week we begin release 0.4 in our Fall 2019 DPS 909 course. I am growing a bit more confident in contributing to shippable OSS now, so for my external contribution I continued by Python work from last week by submitting a PR to another Python-based web application. This time, the project was LibreOffice Crash Reporter , which aggregates crash reports from the well-known, open source office software suite, LibreOffice . I found this tool to be useful because I have used LibreOffice for quite some time on my laptop, which unfortunately did not come bundled with the full Microsoft Office package (student offers are only good for one key, and I used it on my desktop workstation already!). While LibreOffice is a reliable alternative, I can personally vouch that it is a bit more crash-prone than Microsoft Office, which made contributing to the LibreOffice Crash Reporter project all that more interesting for me. The issue itself is simple: there is a dropdown l...

It's been a very busy week, between school work, work-work, and filthy cold Canadian weather. But, fortunately, I was able to get my PRs in, so let's take a look at what I did. Internal Project - Seneca Telescope As mentioned last week , our Fall 2019 class of DPS 909 has initiated a project called Telescope , which is a blog aggregation app that aims to completely overhaul the old and outdated CDOT Planet website. For my contribution to the project, I decided to code a backend filter that detected inactive blogs. To achieve this, I drew upon some of my old experiences as an applied research assistant and followed the age-old adage - if it's data work in Node, just throw JSONs at it! All jokes aside, the method I chose was simply to parse the blog feeds, extract the latest post dates, and write them to a "redlist" JSON file if they were older than a certain threshold (I didn't want to use blacklist because that sounded too grim). It's a blog feed g...

Hacktoberfest has come and gone. For everyone who attended and made an effort... hopefully you all got your shirts! For the rest of us... well you win some and then you lose some. But if you didn't, don't let it get you down - the true open source is the friends you made along the way. And speaking of friends, our Fall 2019 class of DPS 909 at Seneca College has decided to do something a little special for our Release 0.3 assignment: we've started our own internal, open source project! To cut a long story short, we've been tasked with developing a web application that aggregates open-source-related blog posts from current and former students of the DPS 909 course. A very old, and very out-dated version of the website current exists here , but it is clunky, buggy, and prone to errors that block up the whole system. It's our job as the current students of DPS 909 to redesign and revitalize this website into something much more intuitive and robust. The repo of our ...