Looks like I'm heading out to explore the universe, but in reality, it's actually open-source development

#opensource #beginners

Hey everyone! My name is Abdulbasid (though people that know me just call me Abdul or AG for short :P) and this is actually the first blog post that I've wrote in my life. I'm not too keen on writing as I would really prefer to speak things out aloud, but alas, we all have to get out of our comfort zone at some point in time.

I'm currently in my 3rd year of the BSD program (Software Development) at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario. This blog will be the first of many as I start to document my journey into open-source development. In my program, the course is called DPS909, Topics in Open Source Development. The main reason why I decided to take this course can really be attributed to one person. Mo (whose blog I do not have but will certainly link here when I get that) is a pretty good friend of mine who I've worked with alot the past year. I remember him telling me in November 2019 that he was talking with our professor, David, about his OpenTTC program. He was telling me that David was a really cool guy and that he planned on taking his course next year (Ironically, we needed BTP400 in order to take DPS909 and Mo had little experience with Java at the time) so we worked on passing that course so that we could both take open source in the Fall 2020 semester. It also helped that alot of my interest aligned with the course. In particular, the ability to work with new technologies that I had no experience with while also helping out to contribute to something bigger than anything I had worked with until this point. Obviously, getting a chance to work with OpenTTC was huge for me.
In a summer course I did this past semester, I had a short chat with James Inkster (https://grommers.wordpress.com/) who mentioned that he worked on a project called Telescope for open source last year, something that caught my interest.

So far, it appears that most of my peers had decided to take this course as well. Whether it was because they also enjoyed it or that they preferred it to the other professional options courses that were available this term is another entire question. This has been a relief so far as I knew that time zone would not be an issue. I'm residing in my home in the northwest area of Toronto as we've been forced indoors because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic (Which I seriously hope goes away soon, I miss the campus experience). The slack channel we were told to join has been exciting and talkative as I had expected it to be. Also, being able to work with OSD600 students, who as far as I'm aware are doing the equivalent course for CPA/CPD students, just increases the amount of people I can work with. David mentioned that the open source community was global and I look forward to see this firsthand.

Definitely, a goal for me is to work on the OpenTTC project my friend, Mo, is working on. I think it would be nice to have operational for those of us that love to complain about the TTC. I don't really have any goals in terms of what specific projects I would like to work on outside of that. It's mainly about learning new technologies to become more proficient for me. I adore web development so I would like to work on projects that would leverage my ability to pick up some more web technologies. In particular, VueJS is a JS library that I want to learn as it's the only JS library that I have not worked with and I feel like I can make some great use out of it.

I'll keep this last part short, but we had to pick a trendy repo and talk about why we chose it. I actually picked two repos for this one because I couldn't really decide on which one to choose. I chose the "ant-design-vue" repo (https://github.com/HyperTHD/ant-design-vue) and the algorithms repo (https://github.com/HyperTHD/Algorithms). Both were interesting topics that I wanted to look further into. In the case of the latter, I'm actually doing a Data Structures and Algorithms course this semester and I know how important of a subject this is with regards to job searching in the future so getting as much information as I can outta the topic is important for me. As for the former, I'm a sucker for design and it's a skill I want to get better at. I love the design that this repo allows us to use for Vue projects and it'll give me more of a reason to start practicing VueJS in case a future job requires experience with that JS framework.

Hopefully, most of my future blogs won't end up being this long. I always end up writing alot more than I really need to. This journey won't be an easy one but it's one that I'm looking forward to exploring with all of my peers this semester. Now, to get release 0.1 working and prepare myself mentally for Hacktoberfest next month!