It's been a month since my last update. If you're reading this, hope you had a wonderful holiday/new year! It's a new semester, and I'm once again taking a course on open source. Except that this time, instead of the "touch-and-go hacktoberfest-style" contributions, we will stick to a couple of projects and really get involved. Sounds fantastic!
🏃♂️ Warm-ups
One of the tasks this week is to try and set up these projects:
💬 ChatCraft.org
Chatcraft is a web application to chat with various LLMs. It's tailored for programmers and supports some coding-specific features which you cannot find from general-purpose LLM providers.
This project is under active development and regularly maintained. It comes with detailed documentation on how to set up the dev environment. For me, it was a very simple process.
It worked just like that! No errors, no endless research and troubleshooting. Not a surprise from a well-maintained project! The only extra work I did was installing the pnpm package manager, which was also easy.
✨ Starchart
According to our professor, Starchart was an old project from our college. Students could use this service to get a free subdomain as well as an SSL certificate. Unfortunately, it was not funded anymore. If only I knew this before, I could've used it for my home server haha.
I set up the docker containers following the contribution guide. And I gotta say, it's always satisfying to watch docker compose do its own thing. Feels like magic!
Because this is an unmaintained project (last commit was from 2 years ago), I almost expected trouble before I even started. To my surprise, I didn't run into much issues here either, other than some warnings of vulnerabilities and deprecation, which was totally expected. Just your typical npm things.
Despite the warnings, the server ran just fine. However, I'd imagine it to be a different story if I were to try and upgrade these packages. There would probably be breaking changes all over.
📃 Plans for The Semester
Last semester, I left off with some unfinished work in the Hurl project. And last week, I finally picked up the last piece of work and submitted a PR for it. To my surprise, it was accepted without any request for change. I felt kinda proud haha 😆.
Other than another followup feature request, I also asked them about potentially continuing my work in the Hurl project for this course, to which they responded positively!
There are lots of issues in this project I want to work on. I believe this is a great opportunity to further my knowledge in the HTTP protocol as well as Rust. It's like a dream come true!
Naturally, this is where I envision myself to spend most of my efforts in. And for a second project, I think I'll go with Starchart - with Hurl, I'll be regularly working on new features, fixing bugs, and writing tests. With Starchart, I'll focus more on maintenance. This way I can have a more balanced experience.
✅ Conclusion
Not gonna lie, I've been excited about this course throughout the entire holiday. Can't wait to get back to it and have more open source in my life 😆
Top comments (0)