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charitanchan
charitanchan

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My Open Source Journey

The year was 2010. The universe made its move to make me cross paths with my good friend, Jonas Abreu. Jonas is the creator of Mirror , a simple domain-specific language (DSL) layer over the Java Reflection API, which makes meta-programming easier. There was a feature request open for a proxy creation capability, and Jonas asked me if I was interested in implementing it. I accepted the challenge.
I suffered for three days, dealing with code that I didn’t understand… until I did. I still remember the feeling that my triumph brought me that day. That pain was knowledge invading my brain!
This code was my first contribution to open source. I took quite a lot away from my experience contributing to Mirror:
A lot about Java meta-programming
The concept of proxy classes
Javassist and cglib frameworks
How to receive and provide useful and respectful feedback
How to design a tool that will be used by others
Some interesting dark magic
Most importantly, I took away a sense of purpose. I love the idea of contributing to the greater good while challenging myself and working with brilliant engineers who were way smarter than me

Teaching
In early 2017 I got the opportunity to teach AngularJS in Mirakuru Digital Marketing Education, and I grabbed this opportunity and started teaching AngularJS in Jan 2019. After completing the first batch we moved onto Angular 4 and I still teach at the same institute till now. In 2019 I also had a short stint with Edureka as Online Trainer for Angular and NodeJS, I decide to stop than in Feb 202, as was not getting enough time for self-improvement.
DotNetTricks
When I started my career, I had read a lot of blogs from Shailendra Chauhan and I am a big fan of his work, as I have resolved many issues in .Net by going through his blogs. He gave me the opportunity to work with him on his new platform where I have already completed 2 courses MEAN Stack Hands-On Project and Angular Unit Testing
Angular In Depth
It was while working on one of the tasks in NgRx Tim, Wes and Brandon thought the implementation is good enough to be converted into a blog. And I had not written anything from last 3-4 months, so I went ahead wrote that article and published and got a good response. You can refer to the blog on Angular Elements with NgRx and wrote another one on Angular 8
My Open source Projects
Motivated by what I have already done, I decided to start a few Open Source Project my Self. My first project was a Simple Website to collate all Custom Builders
You can check out both the projects on GitHub GitHub
I now have almost 10 years of open source in my journey, and it taught me something extremely valuable: Open source is about sharing knowledge. When I am solving an issue, I am acquiring knowledge. When I send a pull request, I am spreading that knowledge. Knowledge brings more knowledge!
I strongly recommend that you become part of the open source community. It can be difficult, especially in the beginning, but everything you will learn will make you a better developer. I promise.

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