DEV Community: P-DR0ZD

Finishing My Major PR

P-DR0ZD — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 22:30:00 +0000

This week I finished My Release 0.4 Pull request. The issue was from the cuttle repository and it was asking for someone to create a my profile page where in the future they would put account settings. Right now however they were only looking for a basic design and the ability to save an email to an account.

What Have I Finished

Currently, I have a Pull Request Unfortunately as of right now it isn't merged however I believe all that is left are minor design choices regarding the functionality and the main things they asked me to resolve are all implemented now I just need someone to review it which I will on their discord server. I Will update this blog post when it gets updated but I'm confident that it is working.

What Did I achieve

Back End

So From the last time I talked about how I only needed to add back-end Support and minor design changes. To be honest, I was worried because I was having a lot of issues with the back end no matter what I did my route wasn't available locally I was following tutorials and decided I would try asking the People inside of the server. I was able to make a new friend and They helped me with my problem. I needed to add my route to the policy file after that I was able to get it working and was able to test it with Postman.

I'm glad I got it to work and now I have a basic understanding of how Sail.js works.

Front End

I've been learning more about the design aspect of Vue.js and learned more about scss. But the biggest thing I needed to learn about is Middleware.

With this pull request, I got to learn more about how cuttle works how they make requests to the back end and how they can use variables globally like a username. They use middleware. Essentially between the front end and back end, there is a service that handles communication between both of them and stores variables so they are accessible from any page. I got to use the middleware and even create functionality that stores and finds the user's email address when they save it or log on.

My Goals

1. I want to learn how to Create A Vue.js Page

This Goal has been achieved. I was able to create an entirely new page.

2. I want to learn how to Style A Vue.js Page

This Goal has been achieved. I was able to use scss to design my page and make it fit with the rest of the application

3. I want to practice writing more tests

This Goal has been partially achieved. I created a new test to navigate to the my profile Page. I think however that I can work on this more. More on this in a bit.

4. I want to Learn about using Sail.js for the back end

This Goal has been achieved. This was the final goal that I wanted to work on that I added in the latest blog post. I'm glad that I was able to figure it out and get my page to a workable state.

Extra

I'm planning on continuing to work on cuttle throughout my winter break. The my profile page is working but as a feature is pretty bare. Right now it only saves a user's email address. With talking to the people in the cuttle discord some ideas for other settings are Dark mode, Notification sound and volume, and Profile username.

I found a community where I have made friends and they are welcoming to me and are even willing to help me learn. I will continue to work with them so I can continue to learn.

Road Blocks on top of Road Blocks

P-DR0ZD — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 03:48:21 +0000

Continuing from my previous Post I'm still working on the DSP 909 major Project which is a big contribution to any open source Project.

What am I working on

I'm working on this issue from the cuttle repository. It is essentially making an account settings page. Their isn't much design put into it from any one else so I need to make a design on my own.

What have I been doing

Before starting my major contribution I wanted to learn more about cuttle and how it is built. I needed to learn about it's front end vue.js and the back end which is Sail.js.

The other Part of it though is adding to the backed which is where most of my difficulty lies in. I need to learn more about the architecture of the back end to properly create a way of saving emails to user names.

What Does my contribution mean

After talking to other members of the cuttle development team. I can see that my issue allows them to create extra things like email notifications, account recovery, etc.

My Goals

from last time my goals were

I want to Learn how to Create A Vue.js Page
I want to Learn how to Style A Vue.js Page
I want to Practice writing more tests

Goal 1

I want to Learn how to Create A Vue.js Page

I have partially completed this my PR isn't done yet but I have it in a working state where I'm almost ready to make a Pull request\

Goal 2

I want to Learn how to Style A Vue.js Page

This task is almost complete as well. interesting note though I'm using scss which is interesting because my first PR in hacktober fest was about using it to style a project.

Goal 3

I want to Practice writing more tests

I think I want to change this goal to

I want to Learn how to work with Sail.js

This is turning out to be one of my more difficult tasks and I hope that I can complete it by the end of the week. But I think this is a goal that I can work on.

Continuing My Open Source Journey

P-DR0ZD — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 19:09:08 +0000

This week In the DPS 909 course we are working on are final project. the goal we are aiming for is to make a big contribution to any repository. With the goal of using all that we learned throughout these weeks

What Did I Chose

I Decided to continue working with the repository that I'm comfortable with cuttle.

The issue that I'm working on is Issue the feature they want made is a profile page. I'm also planning on Adding tests to this issue so that They can test if the Profile page is working.

Why Did I Chose it

I Chose this because I want to gain more experience working with Vue.js During my co-op search this semester I saw many job positions looking For Vue.js, I haven't used it before this semester and working with this project has taught me about it. However I have only done minor bug fixes and I want to learn how to create a page component.

Also I want to continue practice writing tests. One of the places I had an interview for asked me about Continuous Integration. This is the processes automating Building and testing so that features could be reviewed faster and integrated Into release. I've had practice writing tests but I want to write more tests.

I believe that these tasks should be at a level that i can complete. If their is a chance that I overestimated the difficulty I may come back and add issues to work on.

What are my Goals

I want to Learn how to Create A Vue.js Page
I want to Learn how to Style A Vue.js Page
I want to Practice writing more tests

Adding my SSG to PyPi

P-DR0ZD — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 22:35:21 +0000

This week i had my first experience releasing an open source project and Creating a package on pypi. This allows anyone to install my package with the pip install command.

How Did I do this

using Poetry I was able to build and deploy my code into pypi into the page pdrozd-ssg. With this i can use pip install pdrozd-ssg. Simple enough right?

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How many Iterations did i need

15 15 versions it took me to finally get it working. I had many issues from my script not passing correctly or Having to change how my program started or finding an error that I saw after.

Finally I think i have my SSG in a workable state and allows you to run the script with the command pdrozd [whatever command you want]

What I Did

First I needed to add a main attribute to my code and even make my main code into a callable function so I can specify an entry point.

Also i needed to make my .toml file specify the entry point of the script so i could directly call it from the command line.

Finally I wanted to attempt to automatically publish any new versions when their is a PR merged into the main. This was pretty interesting and I learned their are certain parts that are hard to automate because I need to manually change the version

How did testing go

Testing with someone else taught me a bunch of things from making sure to add the upgrade command because you cant just install again you need to upgrade it so it can uninstall and reinstall the new version.

What Next

Overall this was a cool experience i wouldn't think i would be able to make a python package especially because I only started 11 weeks ago. Now I want to continue to improve my SSG but also make a new package that might get used by new people on python.

Working on Seneca's Open Source Projects

P-DR0ZD — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 02:00:48 +0000

This week I got to Explore Seneca's Open source Projects. I worked On Telescope which shows the blogs of Seneca students. And I looked into the Seneca vs-code extension.

What I did for Telescope

My initial plan was to work on Issue 3639. It seemed to be a lot of work so I asked another developer Tong Liu for help where we would each work on a bit of the Issue. However, we soon realized that both of us couldn't get telescope running locally. We both had the same issue and we were unable to progress until we found a solution. We were contacted by Tue Nguyen who is more experienced with Telescope than us and he offered to help us through our issues. We got into a call together and set up Telescope together so we can understand where we messed up. That's where we found out that the issue was that we modified the configuration file which caused the issues.

So that's what I decided to do I wanted to improve the environment-setup documentation to prevent further errors for new telescope developers. I made sure to tell people about the bug and how to fix it.

Pull 3762

My initial plan for the contribution was much larger but I think that supporting telescope and making it easier for new people to work on means that it will continuously improve.

What I did for the vs-code extension

Issue 7

I was looking over some of the new projects and I stumbled on a new project that plans to create a vs-code extension for Seneca developers. The issue was asking to add gitpod support to the vs-code extension. Gitpod allows developers to easily work in a controlled environment the gitpod.yml can automatically install what needs to be installed and run what needs to be run and it allows developers to have an easier time contributing to projects.

Pull 12

What this means is that I needed to read the setup doc where I researched how to set it up and how to use it for myself. I also looked at what the gitpod.yml file does and how to configure it to run a project and install the dependencies.

My first experience Doing code reviews for PRs

P-DR0ZD — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 01:59:33 +0000

My final goal for this week was to continue my participation for Seneca's open source repository's by Reviewing Pull requests. I participated in two different Pull requests

First Review

Review 1

This was my first review I looked over the code and from what I tested it worked. Others however wanted their to be a new test to test the new feature.

Second Review

Review 2

This was my second review again I looked over it and the code and the feature worked locally.

What did I learn

My way of testing was not enough I need to continue my practice and look deeper into the code to make sure everything works. But I also need more practice writing a valid review my simple looks good comment should be replaced with some constructive criticism and maybe include some things that I think they did well. I'm going to continue to practice but next time I'm going to make sure that when I review something i really look into and consider the ways that i would've done it to make it better or more efficient. From the amount of reviews I had in my telescope PR I knew that the amount their could always be something to improve on or change.

Using Github Actions to automate my tests

P-DR0ZD — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 01:12:55 +0000

This week I improved my SSG by using Github Actions. I added a script that automatically runs my tests so I can test if my main features still work after adding things to my code. After that, I added tests to Tong's SSG SSGifier so I can help test his Github actions script

What I did to my Repo

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First I added a .yml script that runs my script on Github actions every time I run my script.

97a8be4

Then I added a new test to test my script. Afterwards, I broke it and then fixed it to see if it works.

What I did to Tong's Repo

8c581ff

After reading Tongs contributing.MD file I set up my testing framework and started work on a new test. I decided to test to see if his markdown files were working properly.

What I learned

Using Github actions allows for a lot of automation in things like testing and code formatting. It's good to use it because if someone is contributing you can focus on their things rather than the main features.

Using what i learned this week about tests, to help with another Open Source Project

P-DR0ZD — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 21:43:08 +0000

This week I wrote a blog post about how I added tests to my Static site generator. this was the first time I was working with tests and I was using python. This week however I was working with a repo that I worked with during Hacktober fest.

cuttle

This repo was where I made my last Hacktober fest contribution and found a community that was very welcoming and helpful. I decided to work with them again because I enjoyed my experience last time.

What I did

Issue #163

This issue was about making it so the season leaderboards didn't show seasons that have yet to happen so they can add the future seasons all at once rather than adding them after the season is over.

Pull Request

Initially, I was fixing the find query where it searches all of the seasons so I added a where clause and a less than sign so it would filter out future seasons. This worked however it broke the tests for the leader boards, and they asked me to add a test to show that future leader boards aren't being shown.

To fix this I needed to learn about how the tests were conducted. The testing framework they were using was cypress a javascript testing framework. So first I edited the file with the season stats and the start date. After that, I figured out that I needed to change my less than to less than or equal to because it didn't include the first date. After fixing that I added my test where it tried to select the season that will always be a year in the future but it will never be available.

What did I learn

I got to have more practice with tests and got to try and use them on another language.

Adding tests to my SSG

P-DR0ZD — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:57:09 +0000

This week i upgraded my SSG by adding testing so whenever i add features i can run the tests and see if my existing features still work as intended.

755a190

What framework did I use for Testing

unittest

Because my SSG is built with python i wanted to use python's built in testing framework unittest.

How did i set it up

Setting it up wasn't difficult because it was built in I created a new folder for testing and importing unittest. Then i created a folder where i can store test text documents.

What bugs did i find

I found that files that are empty break my SSG and caused it to crash so i added error checking so i would catch those errors then I made sure that my SSG still ran.

Will i use testing in the future

I think I'll still use testing it was kinda a learning curve because i needed to think about how to break my project down into steps where i could test things individually

Adding a Code Formatter and a Linter to my SSG

P-DR0ZD — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 21:45:25 +0000

This week I for my Static Site Generator I added tools to make sure that Pull requests are formatted with my standards of code.

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Code Formatter

For the code Formatter i used black because I'm using a python Program. with that i also needed to install poetry. Poetry builds .toml files which python can use to install dependencies like the markdown formatter i added. Instead of adding the files to my code directly i now use the installation script that is inside the .toml file.

With poetry installed i can use black to format one file or an entire directory. Afterwards I integrated it inside of vscode so anyone who has built the project and has black installed can automatically format the code anytime they save.

Code Linter

For the code linter i used Flake8. I added this to my dependencies so it would allow developers to check for small errors inside of the code. After i needed to add a .flake file so it had my configurations.

Hacktoberfest week 4

P-DR0ZD — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 01:24:21 +0000

Plans Change

This week My original plan was to work on Telescope on this issue 3639. I haven't given up on this issue yet however i think it will take a lot more work than I initially planed.

What Next

I found a repo with a active community and an issue that while i had no experience with vue I thought I would be able to solve.

Issue

They even gave me advice on where the issue was and ideas on how to fix it. However I had trouble setting the environment up i was running all of the commands and it was still giving me errors. So i decided to join their discord and found a welcoming community for their card game where they were planning tournaments and even invited me to play and teach me. After explaining my issue the owner hopped in a call with me and tried to help me trouble shoot and discover the issue. Turns out they built their game on a Linux system and recently tried to bring it to windows but while it did work on their end it didn't work on mine I helped test some things and we discovered that because our versions of node.js were different it wasn't working for mine.
After we got things working I found the bug and fixed it and changed some things based on his feedback. and with that i was officially done Hacktoberfest

Pull Request

What I Learned

Hacktoberfest taught me that the open source community is much more welcoming and willing to work with people of all experience levels. I made friends and learned that it's ok to struggle and ask questions in open-source. Next year I think I'll participate again.

Learning about SSG features with Docusarus

P-DR0ZD — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 02:54:53 +0000

This week I worked with Docasaurus to learn about another popular SSG to improve my SSG.

Installing Docasaurus

Docasaurus wasn't to difficult to install and allows you to edit a document and immediately see the changes online. Setting it up was as simple as using the

npm init docusaurus@latest my-website classic

Replacing my-website with the name of your site. After wards I uploaded my Docasaurus site on GitHub Pages. Page

Features I Added

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Issue Markdown
Full Markdown Support Complete Markdown Support with the Help of Python-Markdown/markdown I wanted to finally Add full markdown support.

Issue Tags
HTML Tags. I added Meta Tags for Description and tags for Robots which tells search engines which pages to show and not show.

Whats Next

Next I want to add

Choosing Output Directory
CSS support