bacm.me

Telescope As part of our open source class our classmates are all working to modernize a system that is very important to Seneca's open source community, where their blogs and content are all concentrated into a single page where everyone at CDOT can "gather" to see what's going on. My contribution for Telescope was to create a new logo for it, so I tried to get as most creative as I could while adding purpose to it, so for that I started with CDOT's logo, since as part of CDOT's software portfolio, Telescope should have a relatable brand to it, so its main feature is Seneca's CDOT logo with a few additions. To the logo I added the Image of the Hubble telescope. One could ask, ok why the Hubble and what does it have to do with a tool that, in a nutshell, tracks blogs feeds and gathers the posts in an easy to read place? Well, since Telescope is built under the Open Source Philosophy I needed something that would relate to it and had everything to do

Background So last time out I was trying to figure out what is going wrong with my .NET development environment in my machine but with no success, although I tried to contact some of the maintainers for further information I had no response so far so I had to search for an alternative and this one in particular caught my eye, it is called OpenDrinks. OpenDrinks OpenDrinks is an open source website collection with many drink recipes written with the Javascript framework Vue. I found the opportunity to collaborate with it interesting, although my contribution was not large, since I have little knowledge about Vue but quite some experience with Javascript, so it will be great to learn a new framework for my portfolio. The website is fairly simple in the sense that is easy to find drink recipes and the design is minimalistic, although the maintainers are looking to improve on it, soI plan on collaborating further during this course like adding PWA or fixing design flaws. Enjoyin

MERN Logins For this week's pull request for Hacktoberfest I have again helped to add a login method for the MERN Stack Project with PassportJs and Javascript, this week I've added support for GitHub's OAuth2 to it. The same pattern has been followed from the last contribution, since PassportJs makes things easier for authentication. Looking at the current status of the project I see that other contributors are adding the React front-end to it so hopefully we could see some progress as I would also like to collaborate with front-end development. Conclusion  Lately I have been trying to setup my new machine (switched from OSX) for .NET and C# development so I can contribute to larger projects that are of my interest but so far it has been a challenge, hoping to not have to clean install my OS this week. I found curious that most of these projects are using alpha versions of the .NET Core SDK, which I assume is one of the root causes of my problems trying to se

For my second pull request I worked on a Windows application which I found very interesting since I could relate to the problem that it tries to solve. UWP App Launcher This app launcher is an alternative to the live tiles that Microsoft brought with the early versions of Windows 8 back in 2012 and still ships with its Windows products. Although enhanced nowadays, the live tiles are still the reason of headaches for some people who dislike them, plus, there is no alternative to this layout so users are made "hostages" of the system as it is. From the UWP App Launcher's creators: "The whole point of this project is to provide the best traditional home screen experience as possible for Windows 10 devices. Some people don't like Live Tiles so this is an alternative for them. Also, apps load faster when opened with this launcher." Below you can see the comparison between the App Launcher (left) and Windows Phone's native home screen (right):

It has been a tough couple of weeks trying to find projects to work on and get up and running with some open source code bases, but fortunately I was able to contribute with a small project with Javascript using PassportJs to authenticate with social media API platforms. The Project - MERN Logins The project I contributed with is fairly new and small. Its owner wants to implement login methods for most major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google and GitHub for example to be used in a MERN Stack project. I have implemented login features and methods for Twitter as requested by the repository owner and sent my pull request to it. MERN Stack The name caught my attention, so I looked up online how does the MERN Stack works. I came to learn that it is a full stack comprised of specific technologies, in this case MongoDB as the database, Express.js as a web server, React as the web framework and Node.js for API and data processing. In the past at Seneca we used this s

As part of my Open Source course at Seneca College I am participating in this year's Hacktoberfest , "Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean and DEV. Hacktoberfest is open to everyone in our global community. To participate, four pull requests must be submitted to public GitHub repositories. You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31." One of my main goals for this course is to delve into the Open Source community and improve my C# / .NET skills, so I have chosen the following projects to work on: Winforms Winforms is a great tool that helps developers to build Windows-based UI's easily. "Windows Forms also provides one of the most productive ways to create desktop applications based on the visual designer provided in Visual Studio. It enables drag-and-drop of visual controls and other similar functionality that make it easy to build desktop applications." I have offered my help