☃️ My December Goals🎄: ending the year right by learning new things ✨

#opensource #productivity #programming #beginners

About 12 weeks ago, I set on a mission to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. I decided to try out open-source development and contribute to interesting projects on GitHub. It was an amazing process in terms of learning new technologies, communicating with others, getting active in the open-source community, and building my resume. Over the next 10 days, I will be contributing to more open-source projects and working on some small issues or bugs. Not just that, I also came across some amazing challenges to take part in to learn new things and end the year on the right note. I will be blogging about my progress along the way!

1) More Open Source Project Contributions 🚀

For the next two weeks, I will be focusing on making contributions to a few open-source projects. Although I have not settled on which issue I will tackle yet, below I have curated a list of potential repositories I will contribute:

1) My-Photohub: This is a Seneca College student-run project. Previously, I already contributed to this project where I wrote code for the functionality of uploading resources to GitHub.

2) Glific-frontend: This was a project I had the opportunity to work on during Hacktoberfest. I loved the idea behind the project and how it was helping to solve a crucial challenge for community-led organizations regarding data collection at a grassroots level. I am planning on working on one front-end issue from Glific. They are also a very welcoming community of people and ready to answer questions whenever I have any.

3) Intel/cve-bin-tool: There are some issues I found here that seemed interesting to me to work on, especially related to refactoring the code or creating new checkers.

4) Some other cool repositories I found containing beginner-friendly issues:
- pandas
- freeCodeCamp
- pytest
- bokeh
- flutter

I am not entirely sure I will end up successfully contributing to any of these repositories yet. We will find out in my next blog!

2) Advent of Cyber 🤖

Stumbling upon this amazing challenge was one of the best things for my December learning goals. If you like me and want to learn the basics of cybersecurity, while solving fun challenges and then getting a certificate in the end, this is perfect!
For my project management and implementation course at Seneca College this semester, my teammates and I are building a browser-based cybersecurity quiz game with three.js. This was one of the most difficult projects I have been working on over the last 3 months. Advent of Cyber is great for learning those basics and then applying them to building content for the gaming project I am building.

3) Advent of Code 💻

Advent of Code is great for putting our problem-solving skills to work! We can solve the puzzles in any language we like and do not require knowledge of any fancy tools or frameworks. When I attempted doing Advent of Code last year with just a few months' worth of coding experience under my belt, I felt miserable. This year, I want to challenge myself to go through all the questions and attempt to solve them with a mix of using JavaScript and Python.

4) Advent of JavaScript 📺

This is another cool challenge to try if you are into JavaScript or want to improve on it. I found this somewhat accidentally when I was just randomly googling "advent of stuff".... Although, the first three are my priority I would love to give this a go and complete it if I can manage the time.

Some Non-Code Stuff 📝

Apart from coding, I also do a lot of writing for Asia-based community-led organizations and non-governmental organizations. I am ending the year writing and designing a 25-page report for a Bangkok-based organization summarizing the impact of COVID-19 on marginalized populations over the last two years based on research materials they provided me.

So...let's make the most of the last month of the year and have fun doing some amazing projects and challenges!