rscotchmer

Well, this is it -- my final blog post for DPS909. When I started this course, I was quite honestly dreading what was to come. I'd heard a lot from my colleagues -- even those with prior open-source development -- about how this was one of the hardest courses they have ever taken. I heard that I'd be devoting most of my week to completing the coursework, that the bugs I decided to work on would vanish or get taken by others at the last second, and so on and so forth. Most terrifying, though, was the fact that I'd never touched an open-source project before. The thought of getting involved in a project like that was paralyzing, and I was dead certain that I was going to make a fool of myself. And yet, in spite of all of this, I still signed up for DPS909 anyway. The reason? I needed to beef up my resume. My first co-op term was coming up, and I didn't have anything software development-related on my resume. Not great, considering I'd be looking for a j

I feel like I wrote last week's post on Aseprite just yesterday -- time flies near the end of the semester! Since that post, I've made a lot of progress on my issue. For starters, I actually finished it! ...Well, most of it -- waiting on some reviews at the moment, among some other things, but the features I've added work.   You can check out my PR here . Adding elements to the UI wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, but it still required a lot of thinking on my end... And a lot of sifting through code, too. Mostly for examples, but also to make sure that I was following the project's general style -- the folks working on Aseprite have a unique way of formatting things, and I wanted to make sure I adhered to that as best as I could. Anyway, after a couple hours' worth of work, I managed to finish everything up on a Saturday afternoon. I committed my changes, pushed them, and... Promptly forgot about them for the weekend. Come Monday, t

For my latest assignment in DPS909, I've been working on this issue in Aseprite . This wasn't really planned -- to be honest, I actually was going to deal with a bug in filer first -- but one thing led to the next, and I suddenly found myself working on this project instead. I talked about how I've dealt with something similar -- making a fill tool -- in last week's blog post -- and much to my delight, that past experience has served me quite well. In fact, modifying the current code for the fill tool to fill pixels connected on a diagonal was hands-down the easiest part in tackling this issue. It took me maybe 20 minutes to implement -- a few lines copied from existing code, a +1 here, a -1 there... Throw in a couple of if-statements, and voila! It's done. The only tricky part came when using the fill tool on a large area caused the program to crash. To determine where the issue was, I used the most basic of debugging techniques -- commenting bits of code

My next two tasks for DPS909 are to fix two issues that are a bit bigger than the ones I've dealt with previously. Thanks to my prof, I've already got one issue to work on: a bug in Filer where flags are interpreted as strings, not numbers. I'm not entirely sure how much work it will take to fix this -- I think it largely depends on how wide-spread the issue is across files. If it's contained to only a few, that makes my life easy; if not, I imagine I'll be playing a game of "Where's Waldo", where Waldo is one of many instances of the bug. On the bright side, my prof has offered to mentor me through fixing the bug, so I know I can count on some guidance for this. The other issue I wanted to work on is in a different project. I recently got into doing pixel art, which is easiest to make when you've got a specialized program for it. A few Google searches led me to Aseprite , an open-source image editor geared directly toward those of us doin

As this first week of March comes to an end, so does my first month of contributions to (public) Github repos. It was an interesting experience, and I learned quite a bit from it. I learned how to use Git more effectively, how to set up various environments for open source projects, and the basic do's and don'ts (like watching out for spurious whitespace changes!). I also gained more confidence in my skills -- enough so to start pushing my own work to Github and join the very active modding community for Stardew Valley. This was something I've wanted to do for literal years , but fear kept me away. Now, though, I've got one published mod and another in the works... And maybe some plans to help out the community by helping to update the old, open-source mods that have broken as the game's been updated. All that, thanks to a little confidence boost from a few Github contributions. Of course, I still have my hang-ups -- I still struggle with imposter syndrome

I really like working in Filer. I'm not saying this just to get brownie points with my prof, who helps maintain the project. I'm saying it because I genuinely like working on it. This is probably pretty evident in the fact that I keep going back to work on it. -- as of today, 3/5 of my contributions for DPS909 have been for Filer. I'll admit that familiarity was part of what kept drawing me back to the project. The other part? I really like writing tests. I discovered this after my previous experience in Filer , where I had to make a test for one of the module's functions. The test I "wrote" wasn't that difficult to make -- it was mostly a copy-paste of a pre-existing test with some tweaks (hence the quotation marks around wrote, ha). The tricky part was more understanding what I had to do in order to create the test -- it was like trying to put pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. I had a pre-existing test to use as a template, some general in

This week, I decided to work on an issue from Mocha , a JavaScript framework for testing code. The one I picked was pretty tame -- just tweaking the HTML and CSS for Mocha's website. I've done a lot of work with HTML and CSS before, so this I figured this was likely to be a pretty easy fix... And it was. You can check out my pull request here, and look at all the things I managed to miss despite thinking this would be an easy issue to fix. A reminder to slow down and take a closer look at my changes before committing them, for sure. I honestly don't have much else to say about this week's work, though (a short post? On my blog? Incredible). It was a small amount of easy work -- the only troubles I encountered were the ones I brought upon myself by not taking the time to review my work. Expect a wordier post next week, where I get to reflect upon my first few experiences with Open Source!