DEV Community: Humberto Rocha

Contribute to Open Source on Hacktoberfest

Humberto Rocha — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 13:57:17 +0000

I'm passionate about Open Source since the beginning of my path as Developer.

The idea of creating something that helps you to solve your problem and at the same time is open to anyone with similar needs to use, or to someone that have entirely different needs, but, somehow can also be helped by your project, is just one of the aspects of Open Source, but it's enough to make me love it already!

However, it's not always sunshine and rainbows, maintaining Open Source projects, especially when they became famous, is a real challenge. It's common to see a project of one or two maintainers being used by thousands.

To help encourage people on contributing to Open Source, every year DigitalOcean runs a challenge during October called #hacktoberfest. This year, we're also counting with the dev.to support. You can go to their page to know more about it at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

I'm writing this post to help you find a cool project that is beginner-friendly. I asked the community to pitch projects on a previous post. So, here are mine and their suggestions:

Dev.to

Tip from @drbragg
Repository and contributing guide

I don't have any OS projects of my own to recommend but I think #1 on your list needs to be this very site! It blows my mind how many people
don't know that dev.to is Open Source.

EmojiScreen

Tip from @brittanyrw
Repository and contributing guide

EmojiScreen is a listing of TV shows 📺, movies 📽️and musicals 🎵depicted with emojis. This project was built to create a fun, judgement free space for those learning Git and Github to practice! Add a show or movie to contribute.

Ara Personal Assistant

Tip from @fultonbrowne
I am working on an open source voice assistant and would love help, check out this post

Accord Project

Tip from @irmerk

Late to this discussion, but I'd like to pitch the Accord Project, where I am a maintainer. I am taking the lead on trying to get participation this Hacktoberfest, and have done a lot of work to parse out as many beginner-friendly issues as I can in our projects.

Some brief information on the Accord Project: It is an ecosystem to build smart agreements and documents on a technology neutral platform, and tools for smart legal contracts.

We have an event page for our participation in Hacktoberfest here.

Postwoman

Repository and contributing guide

I became aware of this project here at dev.to community. It is a lightweight API request builder and also friendly to first-time contributors. If you like Vue and Javascript, check it out.

HTTPX

Repository and contributing guide

If you are a Python developer, it's is possible that you used some library to handle HTTP requests. How about help to bring HTTP to the next-generation?

Dynaconf

Repository and contributing
guide

Are you working on a project with multiple environments? Dynaconf is a layered configuration system for Python applications that will help you to keep your settings in order following the 12 factor app standards.

Pitch a project to Hacktoberfest 🎉

Humberto Rocha — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 12:33:34 +0000

Hello everyone,

I love participating on Hacktoberfest, and as I once had my first participation at this amazing event, every year is the first time to someone 😊

This year, I decided to make a post helping newcomers to find your project of ❤

But there is no fun if is only me recommending the projects...

So, I'm asking you to help me to create an awesome community based hacktoberfest warmup post \o/

The Idea is simple, make you pitch at the comments of this post presenting your recommended opensource project.

UPDATE: You don't need to be the owner of the project, you can pitch for your project of ❤️

The pitch rules:

Only one project per person
The project must have a contributing guide
The project must have beginner friendly issues
The pitch must be one paragraph only (please try to be brief as a tweet 🐦)

The post will be published 16 September 2019 here at dev.to (linked with this post) with your recommendations, so please post yours until 13 September 2019.

Hope you all enjoy it and Happy Friday 🎉

UPDATE: Hacktoberfest post published at https://dev.to/humrochagf/contribute-to-open-source-on-hacktoberfest-29m1

Publishing my first Game

Humberto Rocha — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 14:12:53 +0000

Original: https://humberto.io/blog/publishing-my-first-game/

Games always connected me with technology since the beginning.

My father and I, we built our first computer (a Pentium 286) and the first thing that I remember to do was to play some DOS games like Prince of Persia and Lunar Lander. I learned a bunch of CLI commands just to play my favorite games.

The passion for playing and making games followed me as a hobby. I have a pygame series of posts on my blog, where I go through basic concepts of game development trying to explain them to someone who is starting to learn about it.

Time has passed, the day to day hush started to take most of my energy and my pygame series hasn't seen a new post for a while, so as my hobby.

Then, last December during the holidays, I discovered Pyxel. It is a Python retro game engine that follows the pico-8 limitations and comes with a sprite, tilemap, and music editor.

I love pixel art games, so I decided to take the holidays to write my first complete game from the ground up until its publication. The game is a tribute to the old Lunar Lander DOS game that I played at my childhood.

The theme choice was meaningful to me, not only because I played when I was little, but also because I've coded it with a friend at one of my projects at my Computer Science course.

The process of building the game was quite fun, and at the end of the day, I got the lunar module flying on the screen. The day after I dived into the procedural moon surface building, and then when I was about to figure out the collision detection my holiday time was over, the day to day rush came back and my project stale.

More time passed, during a lunch break, I answered a tweet asking the following question:

When was the last time you coded something just for fun? 🇨🇦

Qual foi a última vez que desenvolveu algo só por diversão? 🇧🇷
— Guilherme Varandas 🦄 (@jgvarandas) August 18, 2019

I love coding and blogging, and most of the time I have fun on my day to day doing it, but something 100% for fun reminded me that Christmas codding day so I answered:

December last year, coded an old lunar lander from Dos clone https://t.co/Bv3xRdvkd2
It reminded me to go back to figure out the colision detection 😅
— Humberto Rocha (@humrochagf) August 18, 2019

I've had uncountable RPG Maker unfinished games when I was young, and many others with different tools. What is so different from my work, or from my Open Source projects that makes me finish then, but not my Game projects?

I decided to finish the game to understand what was holding me back and... I've got the game finished, and published \o/. You can check it out and play it at https://humrochagf.itch.io/pyxel-lander

Also, I released it as Open Source, and anyone interested to see the code can go to https://github.com/humrochagf/pyxel-lander

Wrapping Up

Going through this whole process made me realize somethings:

Game development can be like a hydra. While you are solving one thing, your mind is creating new features on the go. So, like any other field of software development, focus on the MVP, and keep new features to the next releases or projects.
If it's your first game, try to not over complicate things, it's more important to go through the whole experience from the idea to the publishing, instead of making the perfect game.
Tools with clear and limited scope like Pyxel are great to make your first game. It helps you a lot to keep it simple.
Call your friends when you need some help. Thanks Jairo Jair for the help with the MacOS build.
The coding just for fun thing is fantastic to learn new things and have fun in the process, let's do more of those.

Awesome Libs: pipx

Humberto Rocha — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 21:36:44 +0000

(Originally posted on my blog)

I'm starting this series of posts to give you tips on libraries that can be handy on your day to day as a Developer and also to present libraries I think you should keep on eye on.

One of the perks of a good Developer is having a proper tool-set available on your belt, and nothing more appropriate to start this series than a library that installs other libraries!

How many times did you install some Python CLI tool inside of a Python virtualenv? Have you ever updated some tool dependency and if make another library stop working because it relied on a common dependency?

If you like organization, stability and to not repeat yourself pipx is an awesome lib for you.

Pipx is a handy tool to isolate your Python programs into separate environments, exposing their entry points so you can run them from anywhere.

You can also easily upgrade the installed packages without having a conflict between dependencies and have some useful tools like nox, flake8, and black installed once on your system (no more installing it on every single virtualenv that you create).

To install pipx you have to run:

$ python3 -m pip install --user pipx
$ python3 -m pipx ensurepath

The second command is to ensure that you'll have CLI access to run the programs installed with pipx.

Now, you can install your favorite Python tools in isolated environments and have fun \o/

$ pipx install pyjokes
$ pyjoke
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.