Contribution to course curriculum

Introduction

Finally, I made it through Hacktoberfest! And, I also got myself a fancy new T-shirt! Celebration aside, I still have a lot of work to do. Working in open-source means you always have to be ready to look for new issues, find ways to contribute to the community of developers, and always set yourself up for new challenges. And this week, I had a chance to contribute to my school's course curriculum.

The project

The IPC144 course curriculum renewal is a project that aims to update the original course note to a brand new one using Docusaurus. As mentioned before in one of my blogs, Docusaurus is a static-site generator for building, deploying, and maintaining documentation websites. Most of the notes have already been changed to use Docusaurus, but the project needs contributions to review each converted section, add new features, or fix existing bugs.

The issue

After looking at all the available issues, I decided to go with adding static analysis tooling, specifically, installing and configuring Prettier as the source code formatter.

Working on the issue

Working on the issue was not too difficult, and I already have a different blog where I walk through how I setup Prettier, but here is an overview of what I did:

• Installed Prettier using npm.
• Added a .prettierrc file to configure all the options and a .prettierignore file to skip the ones that don't need formatting.
• Added the necessary scripts to run Prettier in package.json.

Submitting the PR

Once I was satisfied with my work, I created a pull request and explained what I had done. Getting in touch with the project's maintainers was quick, as I could reach them through Slack. However, during the reviewing process, my professor (one of the maintainers) noticed an issue when Prettier formatted the Markdown files. Per my professor's request, I decided to alert other students working on auditing and fixing the documentation about this problem by filing a new issue. I made sure to write down a detailed explanation of how and why it happened while providing Prettier configurations so that other contributors could test their changes or replicate the issue if needed.

Conclusion

At the moment, the pull request was waiting to be merged. I will constantly keep track of any notifications and add changes if needed.

Happy coding! 💻