I have finally taken my first leaps into the world of open source by both publishing my own—as well as contributing to another student’s—first open source project!
Zennotate (on GitHub) is a minimalist note-taking web applet that takes inspiration from the visual aspects of the teachings of Presentation Zen. In the backend, the project uses Filer to store and retrieve note data from the browser’s local storage. As the project makes relatively-heavy use of DOM manipulation, jQuery is used to simplify (and beautify) syntax throughout.
On the styling side of things, Bootstrap 4 and a nifty project called legitRipple.js are put to good use. Bootstrap easily enables responsiveness in the UI, making Zennotate look great on both desktop and mobile screen sizes.
legitRipple adds a unique twist to the project: the ability to spawn off rippling CSS effects across several page elements when clicked. Zennotate spawns ripples when the user clicks on any of the applet’s foreground elements (including the Save button), when the applet is (re)loaded, or when the user saves their work using the added Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut (to provide some nice feedback).
The project additionally uses a fairly zen Google Font, Didact Gothic, throughout:
I decided that I wanted to contribute a hotfix to a fellow student’s open-source “Notepad” applet after discovering a small issue with it. In order to make this contribution, I first had to learn how to fork a repository and make a pull request from it—two GitHub procedures that I had previously had no need to follow in the past.
While my first steps into open-source contributions were completed in the span of hours, they mark the start of a years-long journey; one that I am more than happy to dive right into.
Learning Programming 