Support My Idea

Back when Google announced that Stadia was coming to an end, one of the big questions everyone had was whether the controllers would just end up filling up a landfill somewhere. Luckily, Google has shared that there’s a way to unlock the controllers so they’ll work as standard bluetooth controllers. The process is pretty straightforward and just needs a computer with Chrome and a USB cable. And voila, you can now use your controller with any bluetooth device you want. Definitely better than a landfill full of Stadia controllers.

I have had a personal to-do for years to get more involved in open source projects. I literally have a doc with links to projects, tools to find good projects and bugs and even articles on do’s and dont’s when getting involved in a new project. But after years of trying, I have made zero contributions. So when GitHub announced they were going to help make it easier to find issues and projects to contribute to, I decided it’s time to complete this long-lasting to-do. And what better way to keep me accountable than to document my journey and share my experience with everyone. And to start, I want to share a few resources that I found extremely helpful:

First Timers Only

One of the top results when you search for contributing to open source. A great walk-through and some really good practical examples of how to find projects/issues to contribute to.

Good First Issue

A tool that helps you find (surprisingly) good first issues. Repo owners can tag issues with ‘good first issue’ which will be broadcast on Twitter via the @goodfirstissue handle.

And all of this assumes you’re already familiar with GitHub and git and how to create branches, PRs and merge things. On the other hand, if you don’t, there’s a really good walk-through available on GitHub called first-contributions. It’s very detailed and has lots of screenshots and has been localized in over 50 languages.

Okay, this is just the start, so tag along and hopefully you’ll learn something and be inspired to contribute as well.

So I’ve heard about Vue.js for quite some time, but never got a chance to try it out. That has all changed and I can say I’m a big fan of Vue.js now. Simply put, Vue.js is a well-designed component framework that makes creating interactive applications really intuitive. And as a fan of React, I can also say that the setup and ease of getting started with Vue.js is a breath of fresh air compared to the complex eco-system of React these days. A lot of the syntax and conventions used by Vue.js are similar to React and took very little effort to transition from one to the other. For example, single-file components are different in Vue.js but basically the same concept as a React component, life-cycle methods are named differently but work the same way, both have props but with different syntax on how to specify them and the list goes on. I’m impressed by the ease of getting started with Vue.js and I’ve asked around and a number of teams I know are starting to work with Vue.js so its adoption is definitely growing. Of course, there’s the standard complaints of having to learn yet another framework and considering how popular React is, why should anyone adopt a new framework with fewer experienced developers. My response is that technology is always changing and sometimes there are new technologies that are great and that will replace older technologies and sometimes there are new technologies that are great that won’t replace older technologies. And no matter what, I got to learn something new and it might become the next big things but regardless, I got a new perspective on how to build applications and that makes me more knowledgable that I was previously.

I didn’t talk a lot about VuePress, so I’ll probably save that for another blog post. I will say that I really like the idea of VuePress for building static websites but still having the flexibility of building Vue components and being able to use them throughout the site (I’ll always be a fan or DRY coding). And as with every new technology I stumble upon, I started a new site with it. If you’re interested, check out www.dimelomejor.com which is completely built with Vue.js and VuePress. It’s also completely in Spanish, so this was a great opportunity for me to improve my Spanish as well. So stay tuned for my next blog post and I’ll talk more about my experience with VuePress.

CoffeeScript just made v2.0 available and there’s a lot included in this release that has been in development since the beginning of 2017. I think the best way to sum of the changes is the following from the announcement:

This new release of the CoffeeScript language and compiler aims to bring CoffeeScript into the modern JavaScript era, closing gaps in compatibility with JavaScript while preserving the clean syntax that is CoffeeScript’s hallmark.

I think support for the following is a nice addition, especially since most devs have been using them for a while now in vanilla JS:

• Modules: import/export
• Classes: class Animal
• Async functions: await someFunction()
• Bound/arrow functions: =>
• Function default parameters: (options = {}) ->
• Function splat/rest parameters: (items...) ->
• Destructuring, for both arrays and objects: [first, second] = items, {length} = items
• Object rest/spread properties: {options..., force: yes}, {force, otherOptions...} = options
• Interpolated strings/template literals (JS backticked strings): "Hello, #{user}!"
• Tagged template literals: html"<strong>coffee</strong>"
• JavaScript’s for…of is now available as CoffeeScript’s for…from (we already had a for…of): for n from generatorFunction()

Release notes can be found here and the official release on GitHub can be found here.

Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post explaining Automattic’s decision to halt development on their Gutenberg project that was meant to integrate React into WordPress. The main issue at hand is Facebook’s patent clause that is included with React and has been added to the Apache Software Foundation’s (ASF) list of disallowed licenses. From the ASF:

The Facebook BSD+Patents license includes a specification of a PATENTS file that passes along risk to downstream consumers of our software imbalanced in favor of the licensor, not the licensee, thereby violating our Apache legal policy of being a universal donor. The terms of Facebook BSD+Patents license are not a subset of those found in the ALv2, and they cannot be sublicensed as ALv2.

This is a shame for multiple reasons and I’m not completely faulting Facebook but this does ruin the spirit of open source when the decision to avoid a certain open source library isn’t driven by the quality/support of a library and is driven by legalese and potential lawsuits in the future. Ultimately, this doesn’t prevent me from continuing to use React (I’ll be amazed if anything I build gets me sued/allows me to sue someone) but I’m sure some organizations will now have to weigh the risks. I feel like everyone has a similar goal, so I’m hopeful that after some time, lots of meetings with lawyers, everyone will agree to something that matches the spirit of open source.

The Facebook team has released Yarn 1.0 which is pretty impressive considering it was initially launched 11 months ago. The stats are pretty impressive with 175K projects on GitHub using Yarn. There’s also some new features with Yarn 1.0 such as Workspaces, auto-merging of lockfiles, selective version resolutions and a bunch of other fixes and improvements. Also happy to see in the “What’s next?” section a focus on improving the package release process, package security and committing to following semver.