Back to it; Seneca Open Source, Release 0.3

After a crazy (but awesome) 10 days in London, which included attending MozFest (blog about that coming soon), I’m now home and slowly getting back on track. It’s crazy how one week of not being as productive as intended can really throw me off like this. The good: (aside from the whole london-mozfest experience) I learned something about myself; I’m most focused, attentive, and productive in the morning hours. I already knew I was a morning person. But after some wasted evenings, and not-so-wasted early mornings while I was away, I noticed a tenfold+ increase in my productivity and performance in the mornings. Mornings for the win 🏆. The bad: being away for a third of October impacted my Hacktoberfest results 📉. By impacted I mean that I couldn’t complete enough PRs to earn a shirt, and all the blogs I was supposed to write, about the fixes and Hacktoberfest experience, didn’t end up happening. Luckily, Hacktoberfest 2019 will roll around sooner than we know, and I’ll have another chance to really get involved.

All that behind me, it’s time to look ahead and focus on the next task. Release 0.3 for my open source course is due soon, and the job is to complete 3 larger pull requests (i.e not small README/spelling fixes) and blog about them. It has got to be either 1 fix for an internal class project and 2 for public project(s), or the other way around.

I’m still not sure if I’ll do 1+2 or 2+1, but I’ve settled on an internal project I want to be a part of called Supernova and I’m excited to dive in this week. It’s described as a ‘tool for exporting GitHub stars as an organized list’, and interests me for a number of reasons:

1. It’s done in Rust, a language I’m curious about
2. It’s lead by a friend of mine who I very much respect and enjoy working with
3. It’s a good opportunity to figure out how to use the GitHub API- something I’ve been meaning to play around with
4. My list of starred repositories on GitHub is growing, and It’d be nice to have a way to organize them
5. It had a smaller number of people signed up who wanted to work on it than some of the other internal projects
6. etc

The 5th reason I listed may see me land in some hot water, as open source is all about community and collaboration. However, while many brains > one, there are a number of people who put their name down (so it’s still many brains), but a smaller list of people means it’ll be easier for me to find suitable issues to work on 😈. In all seriousness though, I would be very happy to see the contributor base for this project expand, and more people getting involved. I strongly encourage anyone reading this to check it out and contribute if you can. The people currently working on this project are great, and they’ll give you the time of day to explain things (really clearly) or help you if you need it.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading!