Lemmy

I’m happy with the progress we’ve made! We really picked up our pace this time around and I feel like I have been able to make substantial contributions. Here is a small breakdown of what I’ve worked on so far!

Documentation

Detailed in the previous blog

Cakeday!

This has been a fun interaction with the community

Sylvia and I have thrown in a few designs for the cakeday symbol and gotten some feedback. This specific issue has really been cool to work on because its such a big part of Reddit culture and I’m glad to have been part of bringing this to Lemmy as well!

Backend Code

So, I finally got the courage to approach the backend code. As expected, it didn’t get merged. But, I’m not really bummed out about it because I didn’t make a HUGE commit/PR. I don’t really feel like I “lost time”, so to speak. And, I got a few pointers out of it from the project maintainer!

I think the second time around, I’ll have a much better idea of what exactly needs to be cleaned up. This was my biggest fear in my first attempt and now it doesn’t seem so daunting anymore!

I even put myself out on Reddit and asked the Rust community (side note: Rust people call themselves Rustaceans and that’s mad cool).

I won’t dox myself, but this screenshot shows someone very succinctly pointing out what I was doing wrong

Hindi Translations

I raised a PR for this because it seemed like I couldn’t suggest a new language. The project maintainer was kind enough to help me out and open it up for me.

Really, this has just been some quality father-son bonding time. I ask my dad for translations I’m unsure of and we work through them together to find the most natural sounding solutions.

Honestly, it’s kind of cool being (as of now) the sole maintainer of the Hindi translations.

Thoughts

Class

I was really looking forward to our class about the command line tools, but I also understand the situation. Perhaps, we could receive some resources from the guest speaker to check out!

I’m also a bit sad that the OSSD journey is coming to an end. Homework for this class doesn’t really feel like homework. I’ve made some New York friends. I have a new-found passion for OSS. I’ve used git properly. I’ve done proper documentation. I’ve had the guts to go out and approach random internet people for help, collaborations, opinions, etc.

I know this is kind of cheesy, but I think this class has had an impact on my life (in a good way!)

Other Thoughts

A few weeks ago I discovered a really (and I mean really) sleek COVID-19 India dashboard. It’s just gorgeous. The colors pop out in the right way, the animations are well-greased, and they’ve even got a night mode.

I’ve been lurking around their Github repo in hopes to maybe contribute, but honestly it’s way too fast paced (naturally, given the situation) for a newbie to react or web development in general. I got curious to see who started it.

To my surprise, the biggest contributor and founder of the repo is a CS senior. In a way, I felt a positive boost. I was expecting it to be some hot-shot big CS person doing this in his/her free time, but really it’s just a talented 20 or so year-old. It gives me hope that maybe I could start a popular OS project some day that is not in my 40s :)