Ethicode Projects: Contributio #1

Laegel — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 13:09:47 +0000

Hey there!
Today, I'm going to introduce you my latest (unreleased) project called Contributio.

What is Contributio

🛠 Technologies

Contributio is written in Elixir (with Phoenix, Absinthe) on server-side and in ReasonML/ReScript (with ReasonReact, Apollo Client, Snowpack, TailwindCSS) on client-side. Since Contributio doesn't rely on heavy computations but requires concurrency (and because it's been a while I wanted to learn it), I found Elixir would be a perfect fit for this task.
So far, I've been impressed how easy it is to learn and smooth it is to write (when you have at least a basic Functional Programming knowledge).
I think I'm in love.

🧠 Concept

Contributio is a tool made with a big idea in mind: boost Open Source projects contributions and improve developers knowledge/curiosity for various technologies.
As developers from many horizons, we know how important Open Source Software is for us as we heavily rely on libraries, frameworks, languages... that many people spend their time on (most of time for free) to make our own stuff.
I felt this project was a great way to pay my own tribute to this wonderful ideology that made the dev I am today.

To do so, Contributio creates a market: a place where Maintainers and Contributors cross their paths.

It gathers projects and tasks from multiple sources and will participate in the increasing of their visibility near people willing to help.

Contributors would pick tasks, fulfil them then get rewarded for their completions. One of the core ideas of Contributio is to bring RPG functionalities to our work!

Today, the rewards consist of "experience" depending on the difficulty and the time defined for a given task but I'm planning to add more content.

In a few words: Contributio is some kind of gamified OSS project management tool!

✨ Import Repositories and Issues

For now, only GitHub is supported but more platforms will come such as GitLab, Gitea, Gogs... in global and self-hosted versions. As long as projects remain public and comply with the Open Source Definition, it will work!
You can import repos and issues you'd like some help for then let the magic happen.

✨ Find a Project

Contributio lists all projects and allows you to filter them by technologies (like languages used) or keywords. Say you'd like to help on a Ruby project, then just filter them and find the most suitable project.

What Comes Next

Let's face it: Contributio in its current state is ugly and lacks a decent User Experience. Its structure (frontend, backend, staging deployment on Heroku) is ready but needs many improvements and many features I have in mind will take time to be implemented.
At a given time, Contributio will be "self-hosted": its own tasks will be listed there so people can contribute to it.
For now, I'm focusing on the minimal features (imports, tasks/projects management, account linking, rewards and experience), a decent UI/UX in order to release an alpha version soon!

I'll publish some updates on the project on both technical (like what blocked or surprised me) and feature improvements aspects. This will be a good occasion to learn more about Elixir and ReasonML with me!

Resources

Contributio on GitHub: https://github.com/Laegel/contributio/tree/dev
Contributio Staging (may be offline): https://contributio.herokuapp.com/
ReScript website: https://rescript-lang.org/
Reason React website: https://reasonml.github.io/reason-react/en/
Elixir website: https://elixir-lang.org/
Phoenix website: https://www.phoenixframework.org/
Snowpack website: https://www.snowpack.dev/
TailwindCSS website: https://tailwindcss.com/

Thanks for reading!

Before you leave...
Since I've not seen a lot of companies using those loving technologies (at least in France) and that I have an idea of the reason why, I've got some questions:

Did you know those technologies before today?
Are you curious about them?
What prevents you from learning/using them?

Ethicode—what is it?

Laegel — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 09:44:47 +0000

Cover photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

The Path Starts Here

Ethicode is a French association created on September 2019.
Its main goals are to find, develop and support sustainable softwares to reduce our impact on the planet and, thus, us all.
It may provide help on ethical (social, educational), scientific (environmental) Open Source projects and promotes the idea to share knowledge.
As Information Technology is so important for us that it's hard to imagine a world without it, Ethicode tries to focus on projects that aim to be "greener".

Ethicode has not been really active lately due to—you guessed it—the pandemic.
It compromised one of Ethicode's first tasks that was to help senior people to learn more about how to use computers, internet and the risks they can encounter when using it. And due to lack of time for other projects, it hasn't evolved a lot on other aspects.
But lastly, we finally took a moment and managed to setup some of our ideas, such as writing here!

What Content to Expect from Ethicode?

Posts that we'll publish for Ethicode will be composed of series and standalone posts.

Better Softwares

Will be a series where we'll introduce softwares and good practices (that you may not know) to you which will have an impact in terms of optimization and sustainability on your own projects.
By reading these, you'll (hopefully) find useful tips, advice and awesome technologies!

Helping Ethical Projects

Will be a series where we'll talk about projects we decided to contribute to in order to provide support to small organizations that—in our point of view—deserve to get some help.
Who knows, you'll may discover projects you'd like to back!