Learning journal — Week 9 takeaways
by Mayra Lucero García Ramírez
24/11/2020–30/11/2020
New phase, new challenges 💡.
This is the very first week of the Open Source phase. A new kind of challenge.
I have to say that when I received the document of this phase, I was a little overwhelmed 😨 with thinking how, what and when to do everything. Although that first inconvenience, I managed to work on the tasks and I have learned a lot about the open-source world and manage to search for projects 🦾.
First, I researched and learned how Github and the open-source projects have a section of the issues 📑 ‼️ that contributors can work on. I focused on the “good first issue” and “good to take” 📥 . I searched a lot and ask my mentors for an opinion on the ones that I researched, to be sure to take something viable in this first part of the phase 🗓. Also, and very important, I asked in the issues, to see if they were still available.
It was not an easy search 🔦 , but I took it one step at a time and although I research in +9 repos and use just 3 (Bootstrap, MaterialUI & Fasten, so far), I learned a little bit about how the open-source works ⚙️ and the projects. Basic things like, the installations 🧰 , the branch that you should work on, the commit messages, and the structure and requirements of a new issue 🗒 and a pull request.
I also learned that some issues are very related and others could be “open” but have been already been solved, so if you want to make a collaboration, just ask 💬 . I encountered very active members of the projects, that gave me a lot of information for my first pull request (pr) and are willing to help newbies 🤓 like me. I hope everything will end up just fine 😁.
I learned about the projects, also about the programming languages that are used in them, I answer some questions for the phase that can be found here. Essentially, I learned a bit of how Elasticsearch works, the replicas, shards, indexes (and I had a glance of other things about it that I am still processing), the timers and JS, and about the @Autowired annotation of Spring Boot that took me to investigate about Bean, and Rest annotations (@Controller, @PathVariable, etc.)
One of the projects I looked up is fasten, which in summary is software development of tools that reinforce the security while using dependencies, open-source dependencies. The research of this project lead me to know about the LeftPad Incident and the equifax data breach, and allowed me to see in real situations how open source helps a lot of projects and the impact that has.
I started to work on my chosen projects and I hope I can advance and make more contributions. Sadly, one of my assigned issues was closed so I am looking for another one 😁.