It’s October 1st, and it means that the biggest event of the open source community called Hacktoberfest starts today 🎃🌍🖥

For those of you who haven’t heard about Hacktoberfest challenge, here is a short description from the official website:

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.

The first 50,000 developers, who complete the challenge, will receive an awesome Hacktoberfest t-shirt 🔥

Last year, I had completed this challenge as part of my open source course at Seneca College, and it was so much fun that I decided to take part in this challenge again this year. …

If you create a Cocoa macOS app in Xcode, import Core Bluetooth and try to use this framework, you’ll run into an error:

[CoreBluetooth] XPC connection invalid

Here is a quick guide on how to set up your macOS project to work with Core Bluetooth:

1. Go to Project Settings -> Capabilities -> App Sandbox
2. Check in Bluetooth option under “Hardware” heading
3. Then, go to Info.plist
4. Add “Privacy — Bluetooth Peripheral Usage Description” property, and add a description of how your app is going to use Bluetooth.

I’m working on a side project, which is an iOS app, and it is going to communicate with a database. I had to select a technology for my back-end, and I chose an interesting and rare at the same time tech stack for the back-end.

I decided to give a try to server-side Swift, and I selected Vapor as a Swift back-end framework. Then, I needed a NoSQL database, and I chose MongoDB.

I couldn’t find much information on the web on how to combine these technologies, so I decided to figure out it by myself and share some of my learnings and knowledge on this topic. …

When I had one of my internships, I developed with React a lot. One time, I needed a complicated component for a project, and I looked for a ready-to-use component in favor of time. I came across an article on Medium about top React component libraries.

React component library is a set of reusable components that save developer’s time for implementing components from scratch.

When I looked at the libraries presented in that list, I found that most of them look so similar between each other, and it’s difficult to select one at first sight. …

It’s Friday, and it’s time for another story about my Open Source journey. I continue working on Lona, and I’ve fixed another bug earlier this week. Let’s take a look at the issue:

Bug 🐞

The interface of Lona is really similar to Xcode’s interface, and it has three panels. One on the right, one on the left, and one in the bottom. The bottom panel contains some utilities such as parameters, logic, examples and details of the component, and for some reasons, the hide/show button in the navbar didn’t do anything. My goal was to implement this functionality.

Fix 🔧

In order to fix this bug, I did the following…

Last September, I registered for OSD600 as part of my studies at my school (Seneca College, Toronto), and my journey to the world of Open Source Software began. OSD stands for Open Source Development.

This course introduces students to the technological, social, and pragmatic aspects of developing open source software through direct involvement in large open source projects. Students will learn to use the tools, techniques, and strategies of open source developers. This is a project-based programming course. (from the Course website)

This course had an interesting philosophy and outline that are not really typical to other courses: there were no midterms, final exams or any other tests. Instead, students had to contribute to open source projects, along with learning git essentials, and document it by writing blogs. In my opinion, that’s a great idea as students can build their personal brand by blogging. …

As you might know, I’ve decided to proceed with making more contributions to Lona, and earlier this week I had an opportunity to add a new feature to this app. Here is an overview of my contribution:

Feature request ⚙️

Users often create new components based on the existing ones, and the only way to do it was to go to Finder and copy & paste a component file. So, there was a feature request to add component duplication support to the File Navigator.

First, let’s take a look at the context menu of the file in File Navigator:

My task was to add a new option called “Duplicate As…” to the context menu, and once the option was selected, it should display the Save dialog. After the user typed a file name, selected location for it and pressed “Save”, the program should open a newly created component in the Component Editor. …

I continue exploring and working on Lona as well as learning Swift and macOS development along the way. Let me walk you through the bug I was fixing earlier this week.

Bug 🐛

First of all, let me remind you how UI looks like in Lona:

As you can see on the screenshot above, we have File Navigator on the left, Component Editor in the middle (please note that “Add” menu on top; it’s part of the issue), and Property Inspector on the right.

The app had the following issue:
When a user added, deleted or moved component files to a different location, the “Add” menu, which includes some UI elements and list of components in the current workspace that can be added to the selected component, wouldn’t update the list of components. …