DPS 909 - Release 0.4 - Quick Weekly Recap

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. You can, in fact, visit the dummy blog here - it doesn't have very much on it, which is kind of the point. The code that is used to parse the dummy blog URL, as well as the expected contents of the parsed feed, are repeated and used in many places of our test suite. User ragnarokatz of our Telescope project suggested that we take these repeatable portions of code and incorporate them into a separate fixtures module, which can then be shared and used across any future tests that require them. The idea is that, on top of this particular test situation, the fixtures module would also continue to encapsulate any future code resources that can be used to recreate specific environments for testing purposes. The idea came from the bull project, a queue system for Node.js that we are already using for Telescope, and the fixtures that are used in bull's own testing suite. I took up the issue to create the fixtures module, and also move all the repeatable code involving the dummy blog feed.

You can find the issue here, and my PR here, which has been successfully merged into Telescope's main branch.

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DPS 909 - Lab 3 - Hacktoberfest, and the Very Scary Repository

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

DPS 909 - Release 0.2 - Hacktoberfest Week 3

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,

DPS 909 - Release 0.2 - Hacktoberfest Week 1

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

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