Mat's Blogging corner

About two weeks ago, I started a DPS911 Open Source Projects class, which is essentially a continuation of the previous DPS909 Topics in Open Source Development class that I took last year. The class size is much smaller, we have 4 students compared to the 30+ we had last time, which is nice the professor can spend more time with us as opposed to the entire 30+ class of students. For this class, we are starting a project that my professor has envisioned, for now we are calling it unbundled . This project is meant to recreate an operating system for web development in a browser environment. The idea is to have features such as accessing directory of files, a code editor, command line terminal, sharing files, and more, be available in the browser for use on any operating system. The project isn't re-inventing the wheel, the technology is already there, we are just putting everything together. Brackets , for example, will be used for the code editor, while webtorrent will be used f...

I finally got the opportunity to try out GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is a simple static HTML page that we can create from our GitHub repositories. It is perfect for documentation or anything related to the project. To get started, a gh-pages branch must first be created, and then it can be further setup in the settings section. For this project, I wrote a test case for async image loading. I built a simple page that would allow me to test this in multiple browsers. The page is very simple with an image, a counter, and a button to reload the image. As the user clicks the button, the image is reloaded. If the image is reloaded, the background changes colours and the counter is updated. The async testing has passed on all the browsers except for Safari. I decided to dig deeper into this and Safari is like this. I had to dig pretty deep into the webkit source files to see where the load event is fired. After digging around for a little bit, I found the ImageLoader.cpp file. The na...

Earlier this week I finally finished my JavaScript Node.js package . I finished all the coding and testing, and thought to myself "Okay great job, on to the next project." However there was one thing left to do: documentation. I know the value of good documentation because I've worked with a few large projects in the past. After coming back to a project after a month or two without any documentation, the code can seem very alien to you, as if it wasn't even you that wrote it. I typically try commenting most of my code, however my set-up instructions, project descriptions, and generally my ReadMe file has never been up to par. This project has taught me how to write a cleaner, better looking read me. GitHub has detailed instructions for creating good documentation that I've been following. It specifies the order and content that a ReadMe generally follows: project name, description, table of contents, installation, usage, contributing, credits, and license. The...

After working on my bugs for the past few weeks, I've finally completed two of my bugs! The bugs themselves were very simple to solve, but in this process, I've learned how to use a variety of different Git command, including clone, pull, add, fork, and pull request. I use to feel lost while using Git, now I'm much more confident with my new skills. Neither of my bugs were software-breaking bugs, and most users wouldn't even notice them. I finished my first bug in my previous blog, you can go and view it here . Deep inside of Firefox's Dev-tools, one button's boundaries extended to the end of the screen, instead of around the image only. The fix was relatively easy, a CSS class was already created and I only had to place the class name in the correct spot on the HTML page. I left the last blog after I completed the bug, without creating a Pull Request. During my previous lab, I practiced creating a Pull Request, so I had an idea on how to do it this time. I cr...