DEV Community: Chase Reynolds

My Hacktoberfest 2022 Experience

Chase Reynolds — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 22:08:23 +0000

We all know October is the spooky month. What's scarier than programmer's block, or stagnation?

Hacktoberfest was one of the most rewarding events of my post-bootcamp journey, and the solution to this problem for me. I found out about it the last week of September from the Flatiron School career services emails, and immediately signed up. It really came at the right time. I mean, I'm biased in favor of anything October related because it's my birthday month, but also I was feeling a bit stagnant in my personal projects.

Software engineering is obviously not an individual sport. One of the most important aspects of any good bootcamp or 4-year program is collaboration -- from issues such as version control to the soft skills of leadership and accepting feedback. After you graduate, that structure is gone, but these skills are invaluable to maintain for your career and personal development. So I felt tired of simply working on my personal projects, and was ready to jump into the field of open-source collaboration.

For a beginner, open-source collaboration can be somewhat daunting. There thousands of open-source projects, and many are rarely updated or poorly maintained, with sad, lonely pull requests lying fallow for months. I've been overwhelmed when I was more of a beginner. That's why Hacktoberfest was such a valuable resource. I spent a lot of time in the event's Discord server, where Github maintainers posted links to their projects that needed help. Some were in my wheelhouse (React, Javascript) and some weren't -- but I still checked out the ones that sounded interesting or active regardless of language.

I had some TypeScript knowledge before this project, but looking at codebases that used TypeScript really helped me see how the language was implemented and understand the benefits that its evangelists talked about. Now I feel like I have the confidence to use it for any larger scale personal project I take on.

As someone who still has not gotten my first software engineering role, working on open-source projects is probably the closest I've gotten. It teaches you all the skills I've mentioned, plus the idiosyncrasies and rules of each individual project. I also believe strongly in the ethos and values of the open-source world, and just being a tiny part of it felt meaningful.

I highly recommend the Hackathon experience to any open-source beginner, even if you're like me and missed out on the free T-shirts.

Using Github Issues as a CMS

Chase Reynolds — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 19:58:46 +0000

I originally published this post on my personal blog, and of course on Github.

I am a huge fan of Github Issues. I find it gels very well with my workflow because I can check off to-dos from the command line while I'm committing. Recently, I came across the idea of using Github Issues as a mini-CMS, and I was very intrigued.

My first exposure to this idea was through a tweet from twitter user @swyx, who was using it in their SwyxKit project. The thread included other implementations of this concept, including an API package from @renatorib.

For my usecase, and as a challenge, I wanted to create my version of this concept from scratch and implement it using Gatsby. I'm a big fan of Gatsby as well and wanted to become familiar with the Gatsby plugin library.

Fortunately there was already a plugin to help source the GH Issues data -- I installed the gatsby-source-github-api to make my graphQL queries easier. For Markdown libraries, I chose ReactMarkdown, but I might change this in the future. I was passing in a JSON string written in markdown syntax, not a full Markdown file like many Gatsby plugins are designed for.

Taking an idea from the other implementations I looked at, I used labels to sort my Issues into Issues "blog posts" and everything else that I don't want published. You can even use this for metadata or frontmatter.

This is my first full blog post using this setup, and I still have to work out some of the kinks. Of course, Github Issues is not designed for blogging per se. Nevertheless, it was a fun experiment, and I would love to write a full tutorial later.

Autism and UI/UX

Chase Reynolds — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 14:14:44 +0000

When most people think about accessibility in product design, web design, and other fields, they might think about those with visual disabilities, or those in a wheelchair. However there are many other disabilities and divergencies that might need accommodating. This month, April, is National Autism Awareness Month in the United States. I was interested to learn what autistic people had to say about their accessibility needs.

One main symptom of autism is sensory processing difficulties or differences. This means that autistic people interpret sensory input such as sounds, textures, or visual data differently. In some cases, this sensory input can become overwhelming, leading to fatigue, anxiety, meltdowns or shutdowns. Autistic people and their advocates have written about ways to prevent this reaction through UI/UX design. Livingautism.com, a British site, wrote that people on the autism spectrum "have difficulty interacting with text-heavy or cluttered web pages, so clearly delineated text areas, simple page design and clear images go a long way. Pop up elements and complicated image overlays are best avoided, while simple navigation and clear page identifiers will help the user feel more comfortable and in control of their web experience." Although these tips are designed to help those with autism, they are also good advice for more general audiences.

One thing I saw repeated in several articles and blog posts about this subject was the important of customization. With accessibility, it is probably impossible to accommodate everyone with one design. That is why responsive design, breakpoints, and buttons to adjust things like text size are so useful.