Event Recap: Open Source Give Back Day

This is a guest post by Sam De La Torre Baba, an Associate Software Developer with Infragistics. Read on to hear about Sam’s experience with Open Source Give Back Day.

This past January Infragistics participated in Open Source Give Back Day, where we were tasked to give back to an Open Source Community in any way we could, whether it be by adding documentation, fixing a known issue, writing a blog post, etc. With this flexibility, we were given a full day to work on whatever aspect we felt would best benefit us to develop/grow our professional skills. It was so exciting to basically pick and choose what you want to work on for a day!

I decided to work on developing an npm module that would allow users to download a local copy of the Ignite UI files by using what is available in the CDN. If you are not familiar with npm you can read up on it here. If you have a .NET background you can think of npm as the equivalent of NuGet in the NodeJS community. Npm used to be thought of as a package manager used only for backend developers who utilized NodeJS, but due to NodeJS’s recent rise to popularity and tools like Browserify allowing for Node modules to run in browsers, npm frontend packages started to become commonplace. Google’s popular framework, Angular 2, is using npm as its official distribution platform. You can find many front end packages such as jQuery, Bootstrap and Foundation. 

So during the day of the event I was able to publish the npm Ignite UI module such that if you have npm installed in your computer, you can get it by placing this command in your command prompt:

npm install igniteui

The code is currently available here: https://github.com/SamDLT/igniteui-npm. So if you see anything that could use a touchup, find a bug, want to add documentation, or whatever; feel free to send a pull request!

In regards to the event, I had so much fun! I learned so much about NodeJS which I haven’t touched since college (which wasn’t all that long ago to be honest). This all led to me to adopt other projects such as the Yeoman Ignite UI Generator. I’m currently working on a rewrite in my spare time such that users can have additional scaffolding options based on inputs to prompts. You can check out my progress in the Dev branch within the repo. I’m currently looking into applications of the Himawari Node module which provides satellite images of Earth every 10 minutes.

I feel that even with just a single day to give back, it was very productive. I would definitely be in favor of this event being more commonplace as it allows us to take a day to focus on our professional growth and the growth of the community too!