Starting Open Source Development

September 17, 2020

My Introduction

I started coding in 2017 while I was working at a Canadian Bank. In the financial industry Microsoft Excel is used extensively and thus Visual Basic for Application (VBA) is also used for various purposes. So, I started to learn VBA myself. Later, I automated three processes at my department, and the impact was significant in terms of reduction of processing time. The processing time was reduced by approx. 70% on average. In addition to that, the occurrence of errors was also significantly reduced. This achievement gave me motivation to learn programming more seriously. So, I left my job in 2018 and took admission at Seneca College Computer Programming and Analysis Program.

Currently, I am learning Spring framework and working on a personal project with it. Apart from coding, I love reading books.

Open Source Development

I became interested in open source development because I mostly use open source software, and I have used open source libraries in my projects. It sounds great to be able to contribute to the software or libraries I use or other people use. In addition to that, open source projects are huge learning source.

So, I joined the Open Source Development(OSD600) at my college.

The course seems very interesting as it is not designed to be taught traditionally. It is focused more on learning by doing. As part of the course, we will be working on open source projects on GitHub. Students will also be exposed to the tools and techniques used in real world development. These will help students to become job ready after they finish college. I am very excited to learn all these and specially to work with open source projects.

My Progress So Far

This blog is my first progress mark. As part of this course, we need to write about what we are doing on weekly basis. This is my first blog.

I have also explored GitHub for trending repositories, and I have cloned the following repositories.

Spring Framework (GitHub)

I have forked this repository because I have been leaning Spring framework for the last one month. I understand the basic building blocks of the framework, and I am also working on a personal project using this framework. So, looking at the code of the framework will help understand the framework better and how it works under the hood. This is also a great learning opportunity. In addition to that, I will look for opportunities to contribute to the framework.

Architecture Viewer(GitHub)

This project is maintained by Capital One. This project converts PlantUML diagrams into interactive HTML architecture diagrams. I got interested in this project because I use PlantUML for my diagramming purpose. Recently, I have been thinking about a personal project which is related to PlantUML. So, I will look into the code. Maybe I can use it in my project, or I can contribute to this project.