Week of March 16th, 2020 - March 22nd, 2020

How COVID-19 is Affecting Me

• On March 11th, 2020, the New York City government announced that CUNY classes will be taking a week-long break, and that after that, classes will become remote. Well, it has been 11 days since then and it is apparent that nothing will ever be the same again. From the time I am typing this right now, there are over 10,000 confirmed cases in New York City, who knows, the more accurate count could easily be double or even triple this number. It truly is a frightening world to live in right now. I haven’t left my house in days. To be honest, I was really upset when I heard that classes would be canceling. I really enjoyed the social interaction I have had at school, and I felt like this semester was my most social semester of college. I was in a really bad place last semester, and so I worked really hard to get back up this semester. It really sucks that this pandemic stripped me of my social life. I am trying my best to maintain all of my friendships online via social media such as Facebook and Discord.
• My mother lost her job today, and even before she lost her job, her hours got cut down a lot. She is the manager of a restaurant, and the restaurant was already doing poorly prior to this epidemic. She has been working at this restaurant for the last 12 years, and it breaks my heart seeing her work for minimum wage every single day, exhausting herself. We are definitely struggling financially right now, but I am grateful that we have at least some money saved up. I am sort of glad that my mother does not have to exhaust herself so much anymore, and that she can finally rest. She begged me today to help her file for unemployment. I hope that I can graduate next year and find a well paying full-time software engineering position so that my mother does not have to work so hard anymore.
• Sorry, that was really personal, but I just wanted to get that off my chest. But, I think in 4 weeks, this pandemic will reach its peak (At least in NYC). We will still be forced to shelter ourselves in for at most the next four weeks. After the 4 weeks though, it will finally start to die down. We will get fewer new cases each day, and maybe finally, within 8 weeks, we can leave our homes peacefully.

FOSS Project Progress

• I personally read up a lot more on Atom’s flight manual and I found some interesting insights. I was reading up on this manual’s What’s the difference between an IDE and an editor? page and it shocked me about how oblivious I was to the difference between an IDE and an editor. I have always thought that the software I use every day, Visual Studio Code, was an IDE, as opposed to an editor since it has built-in debugging functionality. However, after reading this page, I realized that VSCode was just a text-editor with special functionalities, and that Visual Studio for .NET was an IDE. It made me realize how much more reading I need to do to hone on my tech knowledge.
• Also, within this article, I was tempted to make a contribution to it by fixing “up front” to say “upfront” instead. But after more research and a small discussion with Daniel and Boubacar, we decided that it probably was not really an issue, since it could be said both ways.

[ ] Installing Atom’s Development Environment

• As you might have noticed, this point is no longer checked (as it was last week). Well, this is because, on Saturday, March 21st, Boubacar, Daniel and I hopped onto a 2.5-hour long video call and came to a huge revelation. We all had a collective misunderstanding from the very beginning, and this comes from a big flaw in Atom’s flight manual. We all went to this page first in order to try and get a development version of Atom set up, but we then realized that this is a terrible beginner’s tutorial. Our confusion first stemmed from realizing that Boubacar had a whole different software than Daniel and I, called Atom Dev for Atom development. Daniel and I had the regular Atom application on our laptops and were able to run it on development mode using the manual. This is when we realized that the manual made something VERY unclear. This manual goes into all these steps assuming that we already have a version of Atom already installed on our systems. The manual also did not address some bugs that I encountered, such as that I needed to configure Atom so that the atom command would work. So much for a “beginner-friendly” manual, when the manual is making the assumption that we already know what we are doing. At this point, all of us were having a hair-pulling moment.
• So, what are our next steps? We want to rewrite this part of the manual so that it becomes “beginner-friendly”. Also, we plan to open a few smaller issues we found independent of the above major flaw we found. We also plan to keep reading and get a stronger grasp of the other Atom packages out there.

[ ] Searching for issues within Atom

• We want to build on this issue.
• We think that this section: “Package: Active Editor Info” would very much benefit from some images. Something like this article would be helpful.
• More explanation of URIs “triggered from the system” in “Handling URIs” section would be nice. See this link it is VERY helpful.

[ ] Other priorities to be determined

Other Activity:

• Fixed multiple grammar errors in the Monster Hunter: World Gameplay section. My edit can be found here.
• Updated the acceptance rate of Hunter College, corrected the name of the Yalow program and fixed minor grammar issue. My edit can be found here.
• I feel so impactful, and I feel really happy about the changes I’ve made.

~Jessica Wong