Hacktoberfest, or: help friends and get T-shirts
In one of my previous posts (the one about moesearch), I said I wanted to speak about the things I contributed to in October. I was waiting for the #hacktoberfest T-shirt. Now, that tee is here.
How did I earn it? Pushing patches and improvements to friend's projects. I'll show my contributions here, explaining why I made these Pull Requests, and a bit of history.
sa (simple ajax)
This little library is a thin wrapper around XMLHttpRequest objects, making AJAX requests very easy, even for someone like me that does not like using Javascript and doing "frontend programming". It's a nice alternative to jQuery and friends, when you just need to load a file in your custom homepage.
The first and only PR of the project brings a simple way to add a progress function to XMLHttpRequests objects. I found this functionality to be very useful to build a custom progress label while downloading a big JSON. Paolo (the project's owner) noticed that functionality and asked me to do a PR.
Docker-izing nerdzeu
nerdz.eu is not a forum, is not a social network... we only know what is not. At least we know its creator did a good job working on Docker-izing its discussion platform.
As every good Docker-er (yes, I just made it up), he knows to separate every single component. I wanted to try this new Docker thing, so I started installing and configuring nerdz.
nerdz-docker-camo #1 fixes a node problem being too strict with the SSL certificates: a certificate in the SSL "chain" was missing, and node rejects it entirely. Fortunately, it was fixed in v4.1.2, but v4.1.1 just came out in October, breaking lots of camo installations.
nerdz-docker #1 adds SSL support -modifying the nginx reverse proxy configuration-, and integrates the camo Docker I just linked a moment ago.
It was a fun experience, and got me interested in virtualization/replication systems like Docker or Vagrant.
Rubyin' hard: Yamazaki
Yamazaki #14 improves the project by adding more tests (and travis-ci support!),
and a faster Database#include? method. Roxas Shadow is a Ruby pro, his advices
are always backed by experience.
Moebius: helping a zeroMQ project
After a post on the ZeroMQ mailing list, I checked this "python zeromq-based dealer/router generic server" project. I didn't try it yet, but it's promising. At least, you can now run pip install moebius and you can start hacking: thank me later for moebius #5 :^)
In the meanwhile I worked to other projects too, but that's another story for another time (very soon, I promise!). So, let me know if you participated to the Hacktoberfest and what did you do!