As most of the people, I also started my development career with Angular (1.x) but after sometimes React started to make noise in the industry. At that time, I was working on Angular in my company and it’s very been so hard to introduce and try new library/framework to the system and Angular was fulfilling the need.
But on a personal note, Everyone wants to learn new bleeding technology to grow in the industry and I was also surrounded by this type of questions.
In my case, the answer was Verdaccio.
Verdaccio is a simple, zero-config-required local private npm registry.
How do Verdaccio and React have a connection ?
In my company, we decided to use Verdaccio as our private npm registry and setup was very smooth. I just faced a little bit problem to host using nginx and a small contribution to the provided docs solved it.
hmm.. that is cool but still not able to figure out a connection ..
So after first my contribution, I just came to know about Verdaccio community is also looking for the contribution to develop new features and fix bugs. I just quickly realised the opportunity of learning and international exposure and made up my mind to contribute to it. The best thing is, Verdaccio is in React and it was like a cherry on the cake for me.
That is great.. but I can learn by developing some apps and opting some course …
Definitely, You can learn any technology by making some hello world application and it is very helpful to know quickly about the things but I think it is hard to get the full knowledge and think all aspects. So we need to brush up our skill on that particular language and open source contribution is the way as:
- You are putting your thought and code in front of many skilled developers who are going to review your PR and give constructive feedback.
- You’ll learn to follow community standards and teamwork.
- Learning to work remotely from different places is a cool thing.
- It could be a good chance for other people to learn many things from your PR and make them thought about the things you thought but they could not. After all, it is a cooperative learning to build better solutions for the community.
- You will meet many great developers and learn a lot of things (not just coding and technology) while contributing and it will help you to get your dream job.
From small code changes to write testing …
I started with small code changes and sooner I got familiar with most of the codebase. I started to fix few bugs. At that time Verdaccio’s web is a small React application but it lacked the testing of React components. I really liked the opportunity and started to write test in Jest and Enzyme.
In the end I learned react with testing and it use cases. https://github.com/verdaccio/verdaccio/pull/417
Maintainers are really helpful and you’ll learn a lot …
I personally enjoy contributing to Verdaccio and Juan Picado ( https://twitter.com/jotadeveloper ) and Meoww helped me to get started. They help me at many places and solve my silly mistakes. Though most of the PR have something to add and their review is very important for learning. ( Do not be afraid of silly mistakes, These are fine and no one really mind it. It’s fun.)
We were also trending on Github…
Finally as a Maintainer, It’s a great feeling to have …
A year back I read an article — Programming achievements: How to level up as a developer by Jason Rudolph and it state that:
Program in the open:
- Contribute to an open source project.
- Have a patch accepted.
- Earn commit rights on a significant open source project.
- Publish an open source project.
- Perform a Refactotum of an open source project.
Currently, I and Juan Picado are maintaining Vedaccio-htpasswd plugin. I refactored it to use in current Verdaccio plugin system.
It helped me a lot to get my new job …
I mentioned all above things in my resume and every interviewer asked about contribution and my role in Verdaccio. Interviewers got very impressed with it. Also, It shows your capability, learning curve, teamwork, motivation and passion for programming.
I just moved to Berlin, Germany from India to join a new company here.
Feeling Excited ?? Join the Verdaccio community and Say Hi 👋
I know, Now you find my answer to the title ‘How can you learn any technology (react) ?’.
Feel free to visit https://www.verdaccio.org for detailed documentation and find issues/features on Github.
Do not ask to ask.
Pick any issue on Github according to your interest and if you face any problem, Just ask for help on the issue.( Verdaccio community is super active and Someone would be there for you. )
