DEV Community: Sonia Singla

Git - Tracking method/function history

Sonia Singla — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:53:21 +0000

The git log command helps us to view the information about previous commits occurred in the project. But do you know, you can see the history of any method/function in your codebase easily with:

git log -L :function:path/to/file

A quick example on this command:

It cannot necessarily handle all the languages, for that, you need to configure the git config correctly in order for git to recognize method/function declarations in that specific language.

I checked for Golang, JavaScript, Python and C, it's working without adding any particular language-specific configuration.

Interestingly, if you wish to check the history for some specific number of lines within the file, you can check with:

$ git log -L :<start>,<end>:<file>

You can also pass regex to find anything in your codebase files using:

git log -L :<regex>:<file>

This was originally posted here! 💜

🎨 Bracket Pair Colorizer

Sonia Singla — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 21:01:34 +0000

Sonia /ᐠ｡‸｡ᐟ\

@soniasinglas

Where have you been all my life? This is really amazing 🔥

If you are working with a large codebase, it will save your life 😻

PS: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName… here's the extension 🚴🏻‍♀️

17:56 PM - 11 Dec 2020

1 4

I have been coding for a while now, and identifying blocks, notations, opening and closing tags within heavily nested loops and functions is more of a nightmare for me.

Recently, I get to know about the Bracket Pair Colorizer extension in Visual Studio Code, life savior extension! This extension allows matching brackets to be identified with colours. By default (), [], and {} are matched, however, custom bracket characters can also be configured.

It enhances the way that we write code and helps in a better understanding of the mess going on, in the code editor.

You can install Bracket Pair Colorizer using the VS Code extension marketplace. Hit install and make sure to reload after installation 🤗

Cheers & Happy Sharing! ❤️

Onboarding Experience at Embark Studios 🦀

Sonia Singla — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 14:42:21 +0000

On November 23, I joined Embark Studios as an Intern remotely from India. Getting into Embark, a game studio with big focus on open source was more of a dream and I am blessed with the opportunity 🧡

Throughout my first week and a half as a new hire, I have noticed that Embark’s onboarding process has made me feel quite welcoming, happy, and a positive environment around me.

Ari, my reporting manager and mentor also mentioned to me they expect from me to ask lots of questions, and I can see how positively they gives me feedback, and it’s an important part of knowledge sharing.

Everyday there is new brainstorming, challenging projects, and an incredibly open transparent culture. I was (am) hell scared as well as happy to do something out of my comfort zone.

In order to ease my onboarding experience, Embark has done really promising work and I want to share with you all through this blog post. I also hope that it motivates other companies to embrace a similar approach so that the new hire feels confident in sharing their opinions and becomes a valued addition to the company’s culture.

1. Onboarding Buddy

On my first day at Embark, I was assigned an onboarding buddy (Louis), he discussed with me the projects on which he’s currently working, answered my most of the questions that came through, and helped me immensely to go through everything on the very first day.

Starting a new job as a developer is overwhelming. There is a lot of information to process, new faces to see, and projects we want to get up-to-speed with as soon as possible.

It's good to have someone on starting day as they are already familiar with everything in the company and how the things are running inside the company.

2. Team Introductions

During my first week, several meetings were organized dedicated to introduce me to the rest of the teams. This was extremely helpful. One of my favourite parts was at the Studio Update & Show & Tell call, how everyone expressed excitement about me joining the team, and I totally loved it 🤎

3. Onboarding tasks

Onboarding can be huge as there are many tasks to complete, new account setup, videos to watch and massive documentation to read. To ease it down, I was provided with notion pages, neat and concise, divided into various columns of “Onboarding guide for new Embarkers”, “Mission for the first week”, and a place to discuss any questions or queries.
Embark is pretty good in documenting everything for new joinees.

Setting up an efficient and effective onboarding process for new technical hires is crucial to make sure new team members feel welcome and can get them productive as soon as possible. And I really liked the onboarding process at Embark Studios.

If you are new to the open source world and looking for stabbing your first bug, feel free to take a look here. If you have any questions don't feel shy to ask in our discord community.

Starting with ZERO!

Sonia Singla — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 11:18:09 +0000

Have you ever submitted a talk proposal to any conference on the topic you knew little about, or any project you hadn't really started, or an incomplete idea?

Let me know how was your experience in the comment section 👋🏻

Were you selected or not? How did the talk went? or any other experience? 🤗

My Open-Source Beginnings with Mozilla

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 19:01:24 +0000

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

I am fond of asking questions and used to ask many questions to myself as well as other people.

My questions mostly revolves around :

How could I start contributing to open-source ?

I know these languages, are these enough for me ?

Am I ready to create hype in open-source ?

How to choose the project on GitHub that sounds interesting to me (because I don’t know where my interest actually lies) ?

What are the beginner-friendly communities?

Whenever I used to meet new people on meetups, hackathon or conferences, my first question always revolve around these only. Sometimes I felt how stupid questions am asking, a feeling of inferiority, fear and hesitation got developed within me. I used to keep myself underrated. Moreover, once I got so frustrated, I just chucked my laptop.

Happened with you, also?

We might think sometimes I am unable to understand my own code, how am I supposed to read and then make changes to someone else’s code ? Until last year, the same thing goes in my mind, too. Reading and understanding someone’s else code and writing your own code on top of that can be a daunting task, but with the right resources and guidelines, it is not as difficult as we might think.

Before stepping ahead into open-source, we should atleast know any programming language and have working knowledge of GitHub. Once you start making efforts, be more mindful to your activities, the more appreciation and results could be discovered. I don’t want to tire you people by telling the definition of open-source and all. Go-ahead and search by yourself 🙂

The first open-source project with which I started the contribution is Debugger from Firefox Devtools🔥🦊🛠

A brief explanation about project : Debugger is a hackable debugger for modern times, built from the ground up using React and Redux. It is designed to be approachable, yet powerful. And it is engineered to be predictable, understandable, and testable. Mozilla created this debugger for use in the Firefox Developer tools.

There’s ton of things that I like about the Mozilla Community. Being a beginner, we need proper guidance and help from the community on how to get involved and perform certain tasks, that could be best extracted from Mozilla. I felt the people in this community are not only contributing to the development of their own but others too.

For more detailed Information, visit the site

Debugger Project

If you need any help or want to ask any question, shoot mail at soniasingla.1812@gmail.com or twitter.

Best Wishes and Happy Coding 😉

Everybody Struggles

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:56:50 +0000

In this blog post, I am going to share my experience as an Outreachy Intern with Mozilla 🦊 till now, the time I got stuck(current or past struggles) and how am working to overcome to my struggles. These kind of confessions are hard to write but I tried to explain everything in the simple way.

In the first three weeks, I along with Dennis, worked on the planning of working on the actual reporter prototype, and currently, working on the implementation of prototype. As I have never worked with web-extensions before, my mentor shared some good resources to help me getting started with. I made two simple web-extensions and after that, started working on the prototype implementation.

Working on this project has been so much fun and I have had a lot to learn every single day. Without bumps, cracks and obstacles, there is no perfect journey but in the end, it gets you somewhere 😈

Digging into the task, whenever i write a piece of code, i immediately delete it. It sounds to be crazy but it is easy to assume that you might be mistaking. Did I misunderstand how this or that works? Maybe I completely misunderstood the task, I am not supposed to? Sometimes, I also even felt that I’m annoying my mentor by asking the same questions again and again 😕. Personally, I am little hesitant to reach out for help.

Always remember, there is nothing annoying about asking questions and the earliest, we share our problems with mentor and the community, the quickest we will have an idea about what we were doing wrong, or we will have another approach to try.

I have been contributing in the open-source from past few months and I have never seen such patience in the mentor(asking same questions again and again mostly annoys other person). Dennis, explained everything very well in the most easiest and systematic way, even after asking same repeated questions. This is the Christmas time and my mentor never took more than an hour to reply. In the second week, we had team meeting where Dennis introduced me with other mentors, testing team, and other team members of webcompat. I am glad to meet them all 🤓

Yeyyeye, full speed ahead 🐣

There is no perfect path or journey, and it is fine to get stuck 😉

Week 00 - CNCF Internship with Thanos

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:54:49 +0000

Every person has their own journey, this is mine👩🏻‍💻

Introduction:

Hello everyone, my name is Sonia 👱‍♀️,and currently, am pursuing my Bachelor’s in Information Technology from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. I have been selected as an intern at Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Thanos where I will be working with the Project Complete Katacoda tutorials under the guidance of Bartek Plotka and Povilas Versockas.

I would like to thanks my mentors, maintainers and the whole community for giving me this wonderful opportunity. I am really excited to dive deep into the project’s code base and to learn as much as I can despite all the hurdles that are waiting for me in the way ahead ☠️

Project Description:

Ready to roll with me? 😉 To make sure, we are all on the same page, I’ll start with the Introduction of Thanos, proceeding with Katacoda and the project on which i’ll be hacking this summer 🧐

Thanos:Introduction

[Thanos, Prometheus, Grafana]

Thanos is a project that turns your Prometheus installation into a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity. From a very high-level view, it does this by deploying a sidecar to Prometheus, which uploads the data blocks to any object storage. A store component downloads the blocks again and makes them accessible to a query component, which has the same API as Prometheus itself. This works nicely with Grafana because its the same API. So without much effort, you can view your nice dashboard graphs beyond the configured retention time of your Prometheus monitoring stack. and get an almost unlimited timeline , only restricted by object storage capacities. Thanos also provides downsampling of stored metrics, deduplication of data points and some more.

Katacoda:Introduction

Katacoda 😻

Katacoda is an interactive Learning and Training Platform for Software Engineers, helping Developers Learn and Companies Increase Adoption. It provides isolation for each person, so they can explore and push the limits of their learning skills without worry about breaking the environment for other persons. Katacoda enhances your technical sales, training and internal education process.

Interesting, right? 😻

As part of this internship, I’ll be working on completing the Katacoda tutorials :

Intro: Downsampling and unlimited metric retention for Prometheus.
Intro: Global and meta alerts with Thanos.
Advanced: Connecting remote Prometheuses to Thanos using simple Envoy setup.
Advanced: Using Prometheus remote write to stream metrics to Thanos.
Advanced: Query low tail latency with low cost: Introducing caching to Thanos.

Agreement:

Signed xDDDD

Signing off for today, until next time 👻

:wq

Progress Report - First half of Outreachy Internship

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:51:01 +0000

In this blog post, i want to share my experience and progress in the first half of my Outreachy internship with Mozilla. We are half way done ! But eh, I don’t want to end it, I am enjoying every part of this internship. In this, I am prototyping the next version of our in-browser reporting component in the form of web-extension.

With the help of my mentor, Dennis, we divided the task into small steps : easy to manage, develop and gain clear understanding of the concepts involved with the coding side. On the start of this internship, I thought I’ll complete the basic prototyping till January but a lot has to be done and it will go long way. When we develop a new tool, write code for different functionalities, test them, handle the various scenarios involved, the formatting, it feels the tool will never be ready. It is bittersweet but when i look behind, it feels the sense of achievement.

I had weekly zoom meeting with my mentor and the Webcompat team, where we focused and discussed to change the next steps a bit, re-prioritize the tasks, and make more progress on one task while cutting down on some things. During Christmas holidays, I spent most of time on researching and trying to implement advanced features that I could add to my extension tool. But that should be not be the initial task. It is important to learn how to re-prioritize the tasks otherwise you will be busy whole day but get nothing done.

Probably not as I planned or imagined, but it will work 😉

Currently, I am working on refactoring of code/writing more clean code : restructuring existing code, changing the factoring without changing it’s external behavior. It serves lot many advantages that include improved code readability, reduced complexity and source-code maintainability. Refactoring is a lot like solving a Rubik’s cube. There are lots of little steps required to achieve a large goal. Each step enables the next.

I code @soniasingla and tweet at @soniasinglas

Outreachy Internship with Mozilla 🦊

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:47:34 +0000

Hello everyone, my name is Sonia 👱‍♀️,and I have been selected as an intern at Mozilla Firefox 🦊. I am working on the project “Prototype an in-browser mechanism to report Web Compatibility issues” under the mentorship of Dennis Schubert and Mike Taylor and Thomas Wisniewski.

Project Description:

Mozilla’s Web Compatibility team collects reports about sites that work in one browser but don’t correctly work in other browsers. A person should be able to use the Web with any devices and browsers. As part of this Outreachy round, I will be working on prototyping the next version of in-browser reporting component. The reporter is implemented as a standalone WebExtension, that leverages both standard WebExtension APIs as well as some Firefox-specific APIs that allows gathering more information, like taking a screenshot and collecting error messages from the JavaScript error console.

This task includes adopting the existing UX/UI concepts for the new web reporting form to fit the in-browser reporter, coming up with solutions for interactions exclusive to the reporter component, and implementing these ideas as a WebExtension to be possibly embedded into Firefox 🦊.

What is Outreachy?

Outreachy provides three-month internships to work in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Outreachy internships are open to applicants around the world and the interns work remotely.

You can find more detailed information on their website, here.

Application Process:

The first step you have to do is create an account here and fill up some information about you, time commitment 🕔, experience you have faced being in the tech industry 💻 and, respond as openly as you feel comfortable. Then, you will receive a confirmation email within a week or two if you can keep up the application process.

Once an initial application is approved, you have to pick the projects you want to work on. Many projects sound interesting 🤔 and we may want to join them all, but we will not have enough time. Give yourself some criteria for choosing projects, then pick 1–2 most potential projects and start making contributions to them. Sounds interesting 😉?

Dennis says: If you have any questions, make yourself heard, and keep in mind there are no stupid questions 🙂

You need to set your own deadlines, make progress towards the projects and create a final application.

Sonia’s reaction, after getting an email for being accepted 🙈

It was an adventurous experience applying for this internship, and it’s pretty cool seeing what is behind Firefox, and the feeling of having some patches landed.

There will be three months ahead and am so excited about it. Thanks Outreachy for giving me this opportunity and I’ll do my best 😋

If you have any questions, feel free to ping me.

Project workflow with Web Compatibility team of Mozilla

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:45:04 +0000

The theme for this week in Outreachy is Think About Your Audience. So I’m currently thinking about you 😉

Hmm, thinking about you 😉

We are provided with some goals and another amazing task to write blog post about elucidating the project in which we are interned.

I repeat, am working as Mozilla Web Compatibility Intern in this Outreachy Program.

If you want to know more about Outreachy and how to get involved, read my old blog posts 🙂

In this blog post, I am going to talk about my project : Prototype an in-browser mechanism to report web compatibility issues. So, I’ll start with the short-definition of Web Compatibility : Web Compatibility is the compatibility or flexibility of a website, web application, script or HTML design to function on different web browsers available. Different browsers read the website code differently and differs in the way in which a web page looks in different web browsers.

Across browsers, the web-form at webcompat.com is the primary source of web compatibility reports, but the team also manages web compatibility reporter module for Firefox. It offers various advantages as it’s easier to access, gathers more information about the issue, resulting, the fast-processing on that particular issue 🙂

The reporter is implemented as a standalone Web-extension, that leverages both standard Web-extension APIs as well as some Firefox-specific APIs that allows gathering more information, like taking a screenshot and collecting error messages from the JavaScript error console.

If you want to contribute in Web Compatibility team of Mozilla, check the GitHub repository.

The various different projects are enlisted on the above mentioned repository. If you want to contribute in any other Mozilla’s project, you can check this

“We grow because we struggle, we learn and overcome.”

Hit me up if you need any help, happy to help you 🙂

Week 02 - Progress Report with Community Bridge

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:23:37 +0000

I can eat more 😹

I completed the second week of my internship at Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Thanos under the mentorship of Bartek Plotka and Povilas Versockas 🤗 💜

WORK DONE :

It was again full week of learning new stuff. At the beginning of 2020, I wrote my goals for this year, out of which getting healthier, taking care of my own self is one of the goal I want to achieve. For the major part of my day, I keep sitting on my chair, and even skip meals just because i don’t want to get out of it. I am happy to share that I am working on this and hopefully, this will go a long way 🏃🏻‍♀️

I had the weekly sync up meeting with my mentors, Bartek Plotka and Povilas Versockas, where we discussed about the raw documentation I prepared on “Downsampling and unlimited metric retention” which was really vague. I spent most of my second week in reading Thanos documentation, blog posts, finding all possible user cases that are necessary for the tutorial. Get to know more about Thanos, a set of components to make our Prometheus deployments a long-term TSDB solution with Highly Available setup. Thanos has greatly enriched the metrics system, providing users with a single centralized query pane and a long term data storage, whilst making our Prometheus stack scalable and highly available! I am updating everything in GitHub as draft, you can view the pull request here. Delivered 5 min short talk in our Mentees Hangout Meet, last Friday 😻💙. Apart from that, I got my first pull request merged 😍 (although, it was a small fix 😛).

Yeyyyyyyee🎉

I managed to send 3 pull requests this week, out of which I need to update the two pull requests 👩🏻‍💻. I am very good at breaking things ䷪

PLANS FOR THE NEXT WEEK :

Work on the pending pull requests. I am making changes in accordance with mentor’s review, on a rolling basis.
Focus more on the tutorial work and additionally, convert the draft into more of a tutorial (send good wishes to me🤞🏻).

Before signing up, a huge shout to my co-mentees, Harshitha Chowdary Thota, Uche Obasi, Yash Sharma, Prem Kumar, for being so amazing and supportive ❤️🔥

Signing off for today, until next week 👻

:wq

Week 01 - Progress Report with Community Bridge

Sonia Singla — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:11:05 +0000

LOCK DOWN & SELF-ISOLATED

After 30 years and 1 week of lock down, I am feeling productive (Just kidding, i am just 20 😂). Ready to roll with me again? 😉

I completed the first week of my internship at Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Thanos under the mentorship of Bartek Plotka and Povilas Versockas. At the beginning of the week, I had video call meeting with my mentors, Bartek and Povilas, we talked about the contribution workflow, Introduction to communication channels and had Initial discussions about the project and how to start further. They also explained me about the LTS (Long Term Storage) course, how it works and provided me some good issues to start with to have good understanding of the code base.

WORK DONE :

WORK DONE

During the past first week, I worked on automating the TOC (Table of Content) on pages having more than 400 words. Hugo can automatically parse Markdown content and create a Table of Contents which we can use in our templates. The following is a partial template(smaller, context-aware components) that adds slightly more logic for page-level control over TOC (Table of Contents).

{{ if and (gt .WordCount 400 ) (.Params.toc) }}
<aside>
    <header>
    <h2>{{.Title}}</h2>
    </header>
    {{.TableOfContents}}
</aside>
{{ end }}

For more details, you can visit the site here. The pull request is under progress, you can check it out here 😻😈

Revised the first existing Katacoda tutorial "Global View and seamless HA for Prometheus" that transformed vanilla Prometheus to basic Thanos deployment enabling:

Reliable querying multiple Prometheus instances from single Prometheus API endpoint.
Seamless handling of Highly Available Prometheus (multiple replicas).

I managed to provide some short nits that could be more useful, the pull request could be found here 🚀.

Apart from that, I am working on the proposal for the second Katacoda tutorial "Downsampling and unlimited metric retention for Prometheus" which we can expect to be in GitHub issue of Thanos before the completion of second week.

I managed to send 2 pull requests by the end of my first week, and it's the wonderful feeling 😇❤️

PLANS FOR NEXT WEEK :

PLANNING TIME

Complete the proposal for "Downsampling and unlimited metric retention for Prometheus".
Go through all the documentation of Thanos, play with all the components and fix all the broken links.
Make changes requested for the Pull Requests which are under review.
Prepare a short 5 min talk on "Downsampling and unlimited metric retention for Prometheus" to be delivered in Mentees Hangout Meet on Friday 🤗

It is a good experience till now, and I look forward to more contributing, learning and growing ! 😇

Signing off for today, until next week 👻

:wq