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Alexis
Alexis

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My first Hacktoberfest

Intro Heading

Hi guys my name is Alexis, I work as a Data Engineer for a company called Smartway, a startup aiming to reduce food waste in the retail industry.

Background

It has been 7 years since I started coding, from learning HTML3 basics to working as a Python Data Engineer today. I never took the chance for myself to contribute to Open Source communities, despite the fact that I heavily rely on them on a daily basis.
That's why I decided to change for the better and try to get involved in Python projects for this 2021 edition of the Hacktoberfest.

Progress

I already got my 4 PRs accepted so I am now waiting for them to be mature.

Contributions

I contributed to a list of projects aiming to provide a highly configurable discord bot called Pumpkin ! https://github.com/pumpkin-py

  • I started by a simple refactoring of existing code in a submodule of the bot in order to replace the usage of the requests library by aiohttp. It was for me a good way to discover how to install the bot locally, make it work and test simple changes.
  • Then I had to enhance existing logging system of the bot by providing the list of all users which added specific reaction on posts to trigger bot actions (like pinning a message or opening a new thread if you are familiar with Discord)
  • After that I had a more challenging PR which was a port of a module from one existing deprecated project of the team to the actual bot. It was really challenging as I had to understand more of what are the inner concepts of a Discord module.
  • Finally I contribued with a minor new feature which allow to alter user verification status within the bot system. It was not that difficult after the last PR I did.

Reflections

It was really a great opportunity for me to learn a lot in a short span of time. Many thanks to the Pumpkin-py team for their patience and kindness. I discovered that Discord bot developement is really fun and really well documented. I will definitely try to contribute to the next edition of Hacktoberfest if I can ! For now, my next step in open source is to contribute to the projects I use in a daily basis (hi Dagster) to further my knowledge.

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