Week 10

Guest Speaker: Gil Yehuda

Guest Speaker: Gil Yehuda

On April 6, 2020, we had our second guest speaker, Gil Yehuda . He’s the Senior Director of Technology Strategy from Verizon. Surprising to know that he didn’t like the idea of FOSS when it first came out. I’ve never thought about the downside of FOSS until Gil Yehuda mentioned some points of why many companies were afraid of the Free Software Movement. I forgot that the companies are relying on their software for profits. A stranger may or may not be responsible for his or her code if the code has a security flaw. Like what Professor Weiss mentioned in class, Gil Yehuda also emphasized the key point that it’s crucial not to publish any code that is work for hire without permission. Lastly, he told us that it’s unnecessary to read the entire code to contribute to an open source project, and it’s not the case that you have to learn different kinds of programming language to get paid for working on open source projects all day.

Folding@Home’s Covid19 Activity

The article begins with the importance of proteins, as well as pointing out that viruses also have proteins. Basically, the team is working on simulating the atoms in the protein from a virus and come up with a computational prediction by searching for the drug binding site. Like the discovery for Ebola virus, they would like to do the same thing for COVID-19. I also downloaded this software. It’s really nice that everyone who has a computer can help in this activity while working some other stuffs.

Next.js

April 4, 2020

Next.js is mainly written in JavaScript, which is a language that I’m not familiar with. I looked up couple introduction videos for JavaScript, and I watched a 3.5 hours YouTube video. It’s about basic syntax that a beginner should to know to get started with the JavaScript programming language. As I was watching the video, I also took notes and did some coding activities. I ended up using about 5 hours to finish the video.

Finished watching an introduction video of JavaScript

April 5, 2020

I finished reading the Next.js Handbook. However, I think it wasn’t that helpful when comes to understanding Next.js in a deeper level.

Finished reading Next.js Handbook

I thought it might be a great idea to look at those pull requests that were successfully merged, so I can get a sense of how did other people contribute to the project. I paid most attention on those that only made small changes, such as the PR that modified less than 20 lines of code. Below is a list of successfully merged pull requests that I looked at. Most of them are updating dependencies or replacing unused code.

April 7, 2020

I have always wanted to add the Next.js handbook link and Next.js Spectrum channel chat link on Next.js README, so I opened a pull request. The core contributors responded very quickly as usual. This time my PR didn’t get approved, but I learned something new from it. First, they shared with me a curated list of awesome resources: books, videos, articles about using Next.js. Now my team has access to more resources on how to use Next.js. Second, I was told that the Next.js Handbook that I read is not up to date. Lastly, they mentioned that they are no longer using the Spectrum chat channel because GitHub discussions is their main chat community. They wrote these comments under my PR, yet they modified/deleted parts of it. Not sure why they did that.

Found more sources on learning Next.js

Group Meeting

I shared with my groupmates about the PR that I opened in that morning and some new updates on Next.js. We also talked about the branch protection that we put on the canary branch because it’s causing some permission errors. I told my groupmates about my concerns on creating an example as a contribution. It seems like a big project to do. Since I’ve never used JavaScript in a project, I’m totally lost on where to start. My teammates are very friendly, and they are willing to help me with it. Shania said I can use her as a resource if I’m need help, and she will use her professor as a resource. Michelle came up with the idea of incorporating MongoDB with Next.js. She also shared some tutorial links for MongoDB for us to get started with it. In case the example contribution doesn’t work out, we also looked at some new issues such as “React server mismatches: Prop className did not match. #11600”.

April 9, 2020

Michelle opened an issue and asked if we can work on adding an example of a Next.js project using MongoDB. The core contributor approved it.

April 11, 2020

I found some relevant links for Next.js + MongoDB.

Those successfully merged pull requests that I looked at gave me some inspirations. Most of them were in the examples directory. Then, I found a tiny error in the hello-world directory and opened a pull request. Maybe it was on Saturday, this pull request didn’t get reviewed right away. As I was waiting, I watched a video on how to update npm packages and made another pull request. Both of them were successfully merged around 5PM.

Contributed something other than fixing typos or grammar mistakes

April 14, 2020

My previous PR on hello-world directory was reverted. I originally opened this PR because I saw that the application name doesn’t match the name field in package.json file. Based on the introduction video that I watched, I thought they must be matched. Recently, someone changed the name from “hello-world” to “nextjs-hello-world” purposely. I did look at that PR before, but I wasn’t sure why he did that beforehand.

Couple things I learn:

PR can be reverted, and it can be done by the person who created it or the core contributor/owner of the project
The name of the application doesn’t have to match to the name field in package.json
A new software called CodeSandbox

April 15, 2020

Group Meeting

We discussed on how we should work on the MongoDB + Next.js example together. For example, we can all modify/update the example by opening a pull request to hunter-college-ossd-spr-2020/next.js, and when we are finished with the example, we can rebase and open a pull request to next.js. I started off by initializing the with-mongodb directory.

April 17, 2020

Group Meeting

Shania created a new Google Docs as our Next.js + MongoDB example planning space. She also created a Trello board.

Contribution

On April 6, 2020, I joined a virtual Git workshop, which was conducted by a graduate student in Hunter College. It was a great review for the basic Git commands. I also made couple more contributions on Wikipedia. I found it hard to look for a specific image on Wikimedia Commons, then I realized that I can go to the Chinese edition Wikipedia and click on the images that are on the article. It would direct me to a Wikimedia Commons page, then I can use the image on the English edition Wikipedia article. I also added some internal links on the article. One thing that’s hard when comes to adding internal link is that it often shows the message “This title relates to more than one page”. For example, if I inserted an internal link for New York, it can be referred as New York City or as New York States. Lastly, I inserted two external links as citations in the paragraph.

P.S. I had broken images on my this blog, and Chi Shing helped me fix it through a PR.

Written before or on April 19, 2020