Open Source Adventures

29 Aug 2016

During the past year, while I should have spent most of my time writing my project and Master’s theses , I discovered a whole new way of procrastinating: Contributing to open-source projects! I figured I might as well write something about some of my contributions. Perhaps some of you will feel inspired to make your first contribution or contribute to a whole new project!

Github-Utils: My first Atom package

When I first started using Atom, I was working as a summer intern at Capra Consulting. I was working a project along with two other interns, supervised by some of the junior developers at the company. We used GitHub to manage the source code and collaboration flow. While doing this, I got into using the open-on-github package to save some navigate on GitHub directly from Atom. Howver, I discovered that the package had a particular short-coming: it did not support opening pull requests, since this required communicating with the GitHub API. There you have it. Over the weekend I created the first version of the package and published it. A great experience in communicating the a terrific community and learning to wield some new tools (Coffeescript and ES2015, in particular). This turned out to be but the beginning of my journey in open-source contributions.

Hacking on Atom: enter vim-mode

I’ve already written a post on using vim keybindings. As a developer, one of the tools I use the most is Atom. Following this, one of the add-ons I interact with frequently is Atom’s vim-mode. I use the “traditional vim from time to time, either as I’m doing work on a server at the time, but do to being a little bit lazy at times . When working with the “god-ol’” vim, I noticed that one of the traditional “motions”, where not implemented in Atom’s vim-mode, namely the ( and ) motions, which moves the cursor to the beginning of the current sentence, and to the next one, respectively.

I figured that implementing this action might be a nice way to start contributing to the Atom ecosystem, as similar actions were already implemented by other developers. I suspected that the code might involve something as easy as copying some of the existing code, and tweaking the regex used to detect sentences. Turns out, I was right! After a couple of hours wrestling with the proper regex (I can never get it right the first couple of times, and always result to asking some friends.

I have read page up and page down about how people encourage developers to contribute to open source projects, and how the initial feedback varies. I reckon myself fortunate in this situation, as I received nothing but constructive feedback. This had been a lot of fun! I had never realized how easy one can influence functionality of tools and plugins I use on a regular basis.

Other endeavors

After having the above contribution accepted, I started looking for other projects to contribute to. I will not go into detail on these the way I did earlier, as this post would become too long.

• open-on-github: adding support for wiki-style urls at GitHub repositories for the prevously described Atom plugin.
• Nylas N1: I added a fix for skipping the onboarding screen when being a non-premium user.

Apart from looking good when someone decides to Google you, contributing to open source projects is one of the best ways to learn software. I hope this post has inspired some of you readers to take up some open-source work yourselves. To rephrase: If it’s broken, fix it!”

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