My Open Source Journey

Hello there! My name is Alexander Hugh. I’m a software development student at Seneca College in Ontario Canada currently doing the open source course DPS-909. For those who are in DPS-909 with me, I joined this class because I wanted an introduction into some real world programming before my co-op began. I also have a few friends taking this course and I always wanted to know what this open source stuff was. I’m hoping by the end of this term I’ll be more comfortable working with software, as for projects I want to work on some AI based ones, the prospect of AI has always intrigued me greatly and I hope that I can help to familiarize myself with them more. As for a little bit about me, I’m situated in Markham Ontario. I enjoy programming but I also enjoy building cosplay armors, woodworking, photography and of course, playing video games. Back on topic, I’m starting this blog because I, like many software developers, are trying open source and a common tool used is blogging to document their journeys… so here is mine! I’ll update the progress of what I’m doing here as often as I can but it may be a bit irregular.

As for my first project (and by extension, assignment) going into open source I‘m making a command line tool that will check for dead links/URLs in a file. For this, I’ll be using JavaScript.

I’ll be totally honest, I’m not very confident in my own JavaScript skills but what better way to get that experience than diving in, so this will be a learning experience for me. If anyone does read this then I’d love suggestions on what libraries, APIs and other tools I can use for this project. I will also be working and trying to learn the basics of how to use GIT for this so that I can build up real world skills.

Finally, each person in our class had to choose a trending repository on GitHub that interested us. Yesterday, a friend and fellow colleague (not in this course) showed me this amazing video on an open source project that is capable of increasing the number of frames in a video. To do this it: “synthesize non-existent frames in-between the original frames.” (Bao). As you read above, I’m very interesting in AI so seeing this blew my mind. Lucky for me, this very project was trending on the daily page and I knew I had to choose it for the trending repo part of this blog. I highly recommend you check it out, just seeing how it works is amazing and I think whoever reads this will be just as amazed as I am at it.

That’s it for my first blog post. I hope you stay tuned for my next post, progress and other things. Maybe you’ll gain some enjoyment seeing my struggling and success. Until then, goodbye!