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MizuhoOkimoto
MizuhoOkimoto

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Results: Contributing to a open source project

As a closing for Release 0.4, which is the final task of my open source development course, let me share my results.

Issue

Issue: https://github.com/Seneca-ICTOER/IPC144/issues/64
I worked on the standardized frontmatter across all markdown pages. This open-source project is the C language course notes of my major program.

Pull Request

Pull Request: https://github.com/Seneca-ICTOER/IPC144/pull/143
I've done the following for the standardization of Frontmatter:

  • Added id, title, sidebar_position, and description for all markdown pages
  • Each property of frontmatter was unified in order
  • Unified format of description
  • Shortened description to maximum 160 characters (Reason: description becomes the <meta name="description" content="..."/> inside the <head>tag, and Google generally truncates snippets to ~155-160 characters)
  • Added "Standardize frontmatter" to the CONTRIBUTING.md file

What I learned

Unfortunately, my PR isn't merged yet. Also, the issue I filed a few days ago wasn't reviewed, so I'm not sure if I can make another PR. However, I would like to reach out to my professor about my PR and ask what more I can do or improve.
I can't honestly say that I was able to get involved in an open source project technically in this release 0.4. However, I spent time checking everywhere on the repository to see if the Issue I was working on might affect other issues and PRs, and checking most of the files in the project.
Other than that, I often read the Docusaurus documentation for this project and saw and learned how other students are actively involved in the project. Especially one of my classmates, Kevan, who contributes to this project significantly, so communicating with him made my PR easier.

Conclusion

The 14-week open source development course itself is over today.
However, I won't stop being involved in the open source community. Unlike other courses this was the most interesting course of my 5 semesters so far, as the entire class did not tackle the same assignments or need to take exams. On the other hand, I was a little depressed seeing the efforts of other students. I realized my problem-solving and programming-coding will need some extra work.

In Release 0.4 I made a plan; check the processes and then review all of my results. Now, I would like to make a new plan here on how I will be involved in the open source community in the future.

  • Deepen my knowledge of JavaScript and improve my SSG
  • Be Involved in testing
  • Learn a new programming language and start contributing with a small issue
  • Don't hesitate to communicate with other developers

When I started learning git, I was afraid I could break the repositories with my git commands, but I'm comfortable using git now. I will also continue learning git and hopefully become a git master!

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