Yak Shaving Cream

It's been a long year of many efforts, but I'm excited to be back and blogging on ways to contribute to open source! Recently, I've been looking at a project called Tab For A Cause, which is a cute little chrome extension that enables you to donate ad revenue to the charity of your choice! They have a couple open issues, including some good starter ones for frontend developers trying to dip their toes into the open source world. In this blog post, I'll talk you through the steps of how to get set up to contribute, and at the end, I'll talk you through what I plan on doing next! Getting Started: First off, I checked out their git repo  to see if there were any contributing guidelines or any setup steps in the README . There wasn't a community contribution guidelines doc, but the README did provide some basic prerequisite requirements as well as setup steps. Installing the Prerequisites I'm working on a Mac, so I am using Homebrew to handle my installations. A...

Hi all! It's been a hot minute. Settling into work post-college has been a larger task than expected, and getting into a rhythm where I have time to write up my experiences has taken longer than I would have hoped. As of three weeks ago, I am the singular software engineer at a medical device startup based in Atlanta, GA, USA. In this post, I will document the current state of the software at this company, the immediate tasks ahead of me, and my progress to date in developing the architecture of the new software. The State of Things As of right now, the existing platform, which supports hardware product #1, is written in C# on a .NET Framework platform. There are two repositories, one for our hardware schematics/firmware and the other for our C# application, which encompasses everything from the UI (implemented in WPF) to the software which runs on the Zynq chip on the hardware device itself. The Path Ahead Ahead of me is the task of rebuilding the existing application into a brand...

Hello! My name is Elli Peacock and I have spent the past three months working on a GSoC project to enable the creation of single file, self contained executables for Perl 6. If you would like to look at the code for my contributions, you can check them out on the  self-contained-executable branch of NQP.   As the summer comes to an end, I thought it would be appropriate at this point to summarize what I have accomplished so far, and what additional capabilities I would like to add in the future. There were four major phases to this project: generating ELF files (May/June), handling bytecode directly (July), adding the --compile capabilities to NQP (July), and enabling the use of modules (August). In this post, I will start with the original premise of my project, go over the highlights from the four major phases of work, and then discuss what improvements that would be nice to make in the future. I will also touch on my general experience in the GSoC and my experience worki...