First Week of Remote class

Switching to Virtual Learning

I personally think that the remote class is working well. I have no difficulty transitioning from physical lecture to online lecture. For this class particularly, I get to see professor’s screen more closely and clearly since I don’t have to sit all the way in the back of the classroom. Since I only live with my mother, there’s not much to distract me. However, being able to stay home, I tend to procrastinate more. I often neglect the time that has been wasted, so I need to set up alarms and write a to-do list if necessary, to avoid forgetting any important due dates or exam dates. I also find myself not being able to concentrate during the daytime. I tend to over relax myself, not having the motivation to do work, and overly relying on my phone. As a result, I set up a 5:35 AM alarm for every day and try to get some work done in the morning when it’s extremely quiet. I have UTA shifts right after the class, so I never get to meet my groupmates and discuss with them when the class ends. Since now that everything is online, whenever I’m chill during my shift, I can also text them and discuss the project on my phone. We’ve also figured out how to collaborate through remote communication.

Project

[March 20, 2020] 1:00PM – Our team had a first online group discussion on Skype. We tested out the voice call and shared screens. Everything is working well. It lasted about 2 hours. Shania explained us some basic concepts in Next.js such as Node.js, React, regular JavaScript, and the difference between Next.js and Gatsby. We also talked about our progress on watching the Next.js crash course video on YouTube. We also found a Next.js Handbook on freeCodeCamp. Since there aren’t that many of resource links for the newcomers on repo, we had to search them separately online. We also added more issues to our list on Google Docs. For example, Add Testing guide to documentation #10967, More inclusive documentation for next.js #9537, and Request: example for redux toolkit. Lastly, we “invaded” their online communication channel on Spectrum.chat. I use the word “invaded” because the link to the channel was found under a post in the Discussions. Compared to other explicit links, this communicate channel link is well hidden.

There are many “good first issues”, yet they are challenging and not easy to start. I came up with an idea of looking at students’ project contributions from last semester, so we know what kind of different contributions that they did for their projects. I looked at couple students’ contribution pages. I saw someone made a contribution by fixing some grammatical mistakes, someone provided assistance to a given issue, and someone fixed a typo on a file. Overall, I realized that the project contribution doesn’t have to be something big or complicated. It can be as small as fixing a typo, and it can also be a bit challenging by adding implementations to the project.

As a group, we’ve decided couple ways to contribute to the project (other than resolving the issues):

• Learning more about building Next.js applications, so we can volunteer or participate in their online community channel
• Asking questions in the group channel
• Adding project examples
• Add in-code documentation (first have a well understanding of the code)
• Write Thank you notes
• Adding those useful resource links that we found on repo (i.e. video, handbook, and links to their online community chat channel)
• Maybe creating a Wikipedia page for Next.js

Contribution

I noticed that there are differences between the Chinese edition and the English edition of Wikipedia articles. I thought it might be a good way to contribute by incorporating the differences on the English edition of Wikipedia. This week I added release date column under television series and filled in the dates based on the Chinese edition of Wikipedia for a Chinese actor. Last week I inserted an image through the search bar. However, the search bar didn’t have enough of the most recent images, and it will always show “No result found” on the page if I typed in a specific topic. My plan was to insert an image of a Huawei phone on Huawei Wikipedia page, and I did find a related image on Wikimedia Commons. I remembered from the lecture that everything on Wikimedia Commons is FREE, which means I should be able to use the image from this website on Wikipedia. The video Wikipedia editing basics: Uploading and adding images demonstrated me step by step on how to upload image on Wikimedia as well as how to use the Thumbnail link on Wiki. As a result, I inserted an image of Huawei Mate 20 Pro (Mainland China version) black from Wikimedia Commons.