DEV Community: Sascha Manns

Support the open source community? Yes with pleasure, but how?

Sascha Manns — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:17:48 +0000

Have you ever thought the same way? If so, this article might interest you. Every day we consciously and unconsciously come into contact with free software. Even very many cloud servers use Linux and similar open source operating systems. There is a vast amount of free software from various fields: Research, education, business, medicine and many other areas.

Especially the GNU project has significantly contributed to the fact that free software is what it is today. A global community of people who develop and improve things together.

Basically everyone is invited to participate. Many people would also like to participate, but don't know how.

The German Informatics Society, the largest computer science professional association in the German-speaking world, founded the Open Source Software working group in 2022. This working group plans events to inform people about open source software and to motivate participants to get involved.

On February 13, 2023, the event "Supporting the Open Source Community? Yes gladly, but how? What are the possibilities to support the open source community (software, hardware, data) as an individual or as an organization?" In the coming days I will inform about the event in further posts.

Computer scientist Michel Pecchia had the first contribution. He identified 3 categories of support for open source: using, funding and collaborating.

Support through use

Using open source software increases its relevance and also its market share in society and leads to more digital sovereignty. Using open source software also represents the easiest way to get started. On the topic of digital sovereignty, another post will also follow.

Besides open source software, there is of course also open source hardware. Here, too, dependencies can be reduced.

Then there is also open content (e.g. Creative Commons licensed), open data (Open Data) and here transparency leads to better collaboration and accelerates research. For example, during the Conron pandemic there was a release of at least one open source vaccine. This allowed vaccines to be produced without having to pay import costs.

What was new to me, and what I learned from Michel's contribution, is that there are other ways in which the open source idea is used. For example, in Open Source Seeds, which targets the sharing of free seeds.

Support through funding

Open source associations and open source projects can be identified here. In the case of the former, carrying advertising, donations and also membership fees can be assigned. If one wants to support an open source project, crowdfunding and microcrowdfunding is a good entry point. There might also be a remunerated option for the further development of program parts. If you are an enterprise, using open source enterprise solutions might also work well. For example, something like Owncloud as local storage and much more. If you want to support projects like Wikipedia, you should also consider that these are also based on other projects, such as PHP or MySQL. Thus, a potential donor should also think about it.

Support through participation in the organization / associations

Many local open source groups offer a quick entry and like-minded people to exchange. Here one could become active in the region and organize e.g. information booths.

Voluntary activities would be e.g. translating and proofreading of documentations of any coleur. Events can be organized. The web presence should be kept up to date, whereby one can also contribute here. So far, I have considered the topic of design to be marginal. But in fact, an appealing flyer, infographic or website article is the first thing a potential user sees.

Michel divided the topic block into 1.) collaboration on the organization itself and 2.) collaboration on the actual project.

Support through collaboration in the open source project

There is also a lot to do in the actual project. Similar to an organization, meetings have to be organized, workshops, conferences and events have to be prepared. If the used software causes problems, bug reports and feature requests are welcome, because it leads step by step to a more stable and gladly used software.

Then layouts and design guides for different areas have to be produced. Art for t-shirts and logos are also very welcome.

The topic of documentation is necessary, but not enjoyable for everyone. If you enjoy documentation, join a project and help out there. Many projects offer newsletters to keep the community up to date. Even though this can be very time consuming, it is worth it and leads to a better perception of the project. Tutorials and project documentation and their translations round out the possibilities.

Many projects offer communication channels that need moderators. If you like to help, share your experience with the (other) newcomers in the project.

If you are past the stage of just writing bug reports, but also know how to fix the bugs, then you can handle open issues. If you are not that far yet, it is possible to increase the quality of a bug report by asking more questions and thus save time for the developers. The implementation of desired new features is also important and regularly leads to happy faces in the community. Then, of course, there are tools and tests where experience is welcome.

As also written in the previous section on organization, documentation (tutorials & mentoring) is also important here.

In projects where data plays a big role, one could help to collect images, GPS and GIS data and keep them up to date. For example, OpenStreetView offers everyone the opportunity to improve the map material in his home town or around. The entire database is available to everyone at the same time.

Finally, a piece of information on the side. As mentioned above, there are also open source projects outside of software development. For example Open Source Plant Varieties, Open Source Standards or Open Source Design House Building Kits.

Concrete examples of support possibilities

At this point Michel brought concrete examples. For example, the Free Software Foundation is happy about designers and people who like to organize lectures or booths.

The Open Source Guidelines are a project that provides individuals, communities and companies with information on how to run or contribute to an open source project.

With weeklyOSM the OpenStreetMap community informs about its progress. Co-writers and translators could make a big difference here.

Wikipedia could serve as an example for the "data, free knowledge" area. Pick pages where you are knowledgeable and share your knowledge.

The Open Source DIN SPEC 3105 project is working on ways to publish DIN SPECs under an open source license.

The last example mentioned here is the open source WikIHouse, a modular construction system designed for the design, manufacture and assembly of buildings.

If you liked this article, feel free to use the reaction buttons below the article, or comment.

Source: Michel Pecchia Presentation (german paper)

Latex Curriculum Vitae 0.9.0-beta1 released!

Sascha Manns — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 19:18:54 +0000

After 4 weeks of hard work i'm pleased to announce the first public beta of Latex Curriculum Vitae. This time in .net core, wpf and entity framework core.

What is Latex Curriculum Vitae? It is a little helper for writing job applications. I'm deliver a set of LaTEX documents where you can modify, or just use your already created one.

Inside Latex Curriculum Vitae you just have to type the job application dependend information. Latex Curriculum Vitae builds the LaTEX code, creates PDFs and sends out to the company.

Automatically it creates a CSV file, what you can use for printing all of your application details. Also it has a database, where you can manage the current status of your applications.

More information on: [https://saigkill.github.io/latex_curriculum_vitae-dotnet/].

If you are an coder so please read: [https://github.com/saigkill/latex_curriculum_vitae-dotnet/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md]. I need currently some help in some cases.

The last Exe can downloaded on [https://github.com/saigkill/latex_curriculum_vitae-dotnet/releases].

Searching for a easy to use and free option for merging PDFs.

Sascha Manns — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 18:10:31 +0000

Currently i'm working on an .NET-Core project, what supports me and other to write job applications.
The PDF generation is done by LaTEX. Now i'm seraching for a option to merge the PDFs.
I searched the internet, but found mostly just nonfree options.
Maybe anyone knows a alternative?

ASP.NET Core WebApp doesn't work

Sascha Manns — Wed, 13 May 2020 14:35:15 +0000

Hello developers,

last week i upgraded my blogs codebase from ASP .NET Core 2.1 to 3.1. I think anything goes broken.
The build itself works as expected without any errors. Then Visual Studio opens the configured port on localhost. And then i just see a blank page without anything.
If you are also develop with ASP .NET Core, maybe you can have a look about my repository: https://github.com/saigkill/saschamannsde/ ?
I already checked that locations, where i expected an error, but nothing found. :-( I think i have forgotten anything in that codebase...

Need help by moving a Webapp from Azure to NAS

Sascha Manns — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 19:12:04 +0000

Hello developers,
I created a Website with ASP .NET Core and its source code is placed there: https://github.com/saigkill/saschamannsde

8 Month have run it in Azure as Webservice. Now i would like to move that Webapp to my NAS. I prepared there a Virtual System based on Windows Server 2019 Essentials and placed the hosting package there, who depends my .NET Core version. With the last commit i tried out, to prepare it for the Usage in my NAS by configuring the Kestrel.

Also i prepared IIS and WebDeploy on the target system. The build and deploy process works as expected. But a http://localhost:5000/ doesn't show any deployment.

Maybe anyone has done such task already and can have a look (maybe via TeamViewer)?

Greetings Sascha

What means the unicorn response?

Sascha Manns — Fri, 24 May 2019 19:12:58 +0000

Hi developers,
just now i have a little question. After we written an article, readers can response in three ways:

heart
unicorn
reading list

The first and the last i can imagine, what it means. But what says the unicorn?

Animated Typing Utility with JavaScript

Sascha Manns — Tue, 21 May 2019 21:36:00 +0000

Ever wished a animated typing effect in your webproject? If yes, you should definitive check out the typit.js library. Last days i stumbled upon that interesting library.

The effect looks like:

How could you implement it?

Let we say, you would like to use this effect to show others your different job experiences.

First place a tag inside your code like that one:

<p id="replaceJobs"></p>

Then create a typeit.js file with the content

new TypeIt('#replaceJobs', {
    strings: ["Job1", "Job2", "Job3"],
    speed: 200,
    cursorSpeed: 1000,
    nextStringDelay: 750,
    loop: true,
    breakLines: false,
    waitUntilVisible: true
}).go();

Now add the JavaScript to your Layout Section:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/typeit@VERSION_NUMBER/dist/typeit.min.js"></script>

and refer your typeit.js to that page, where your "replaceJobs" tag is placed. Now your type effect will start :-)

Linkedin Recommendation API

Sascha Manns — Thu, 16 May 2019 09:08:19 +0000

Hello. Currently i'm planning to add Linkedins Recommendation to my Website. So i just would like to know, if anyone has seen a API, implemented for .NET Core?

Adding a estimated time to read to a .NET Core Blog with Razor

Sascha Manns — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This week i implemented a feature what shows you, how many time you have to spend, to read a blog article.

In the first step, i used my model BlogStory to get the content. Then Razor does the following:

It counts the spaces between the words and adds 1. So now we knowing how many words we have in that article.
The most people can read 200 to 250 in one minute. So we need to divide the counted words with 250. Then we knowing, how many minutes it takes to read.
Then we combine a modulo with a divide to get the seconds.

@{
    var word_count = @Model.Body;
    var counts = word_count.Count(ch => ch == ' ') + 1;    
    var minutes = counts / 250;
    var seconds = counts % 250 / (250 / 60);
    var str_minutes = (minutes == 1) ? "Minute " : "Minutes ";
    var str_seconds = (seconds == 1) ? "Second " : "Seconds ";    
}

Now we placing the code for displaying the estimated time to read

<i class="fas fa-clock"></i> @minutes @str_minutes  @seconds @str_seconds

On the place, where this snipped is, will be the estimated time to read.

Currently it is placed on client side. It is planned to move that function to server side in future.

This work by Sascha Manns is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE).

Based on a work at saschamanns.de.

Copy multiple elements to the clipboard with Windows 10

Sascha Manns — Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Saving Time in Windows 10

Many people knowing the problem. You're working an one app, and you need some text fragments or pictures from another app. Before Windows 10 you have to copy and paste them many times. But now you can copy multiple fragments and pictures in one time. But how to do it?

First of all you have have to register yourself as Microsoft Insider as explainedthere. Then you can follow the next steps.

How to use the new Windows 10 Clipboard?

First click inside your Windows 10 on Start > Settings > System > Clipboard and activate Save more Elements
Then start the app, where you want to copy anything.
Now mark a element and copy it with STRG+C or with the copy command.
Do this with all needed Fragments.
Now go to the app, where the stuff should be placed.
Use the Windows-Logo-Key+V.Now you see all copied content in a small box.Just click on one element, and it's pasted into your target app.