This is late... - September Status Update

Well, school has begun, work has been done, and as the title says, this status update is rather late. It will also include my work over the extra half month of October, so the next update will be rather short (or who knows, maybe I’ll get a lot of work done).

Getting right into it, since winning the KuriusHacks 2020 hackathon, we’ve been helping the Kurius team on their new initiative titled HackItForward. Its goal is to get developers to create projects and connect with organizations which are trying to solve challenges affecting the world. It’s still in the very early stages of development, the largest project I’ve worked on with others I know, and the first project I’m the maintainer of. This has proven to be quite a great learning experience, especially in terms of project maintenance.

Moving on to some new stuff, I’m beginning my work on an notification/error tracking alternative to Sentry, which I’ve named Snitch. This is part of my plan to improve my overall logging infrastructure which is currently almost non-existent.¹ My goal behind Snitch is to keep it extremely lightweight and minimalistic, while making sure it’s still efficient at doing what it’s supposed to do: keep errors and other notifications/events in a centralized, easy to access place. I’m also doing it as an opportunity to learn Go. I’ll write a separate post just about Snitch and my overall logging infrastructure once I get a little further.

Moving onto October, we all know about DigitalOcean’s Hack? Spam? -toberfest. Some people claim this event has done little to no good,^{2 3} but this event has certainly affected some communities in a positive way.⁴ In short, I think Hacktoberfest started out pretty poorly. It spammed hundreds, if not thousands, of maintainers with meaningless pull requests, all as part of a marketing effort. But we’ve all read about that. Once enough people raised issues about the opt-out model, DigitalOcean changed the event for the better: they implemented opt-in participation from maintainers.⁵ While this may not have prevented the spam, it at least made it meaningless for the spammers.

Finally, I’m dreading having some fun with OpenGL, attempting to make some proceduraly generated terrain.⁶ I’ve learned it’s rather difficult to find some C (not C++) tutorials on modern OpenGL, but I’ve managed to get past that. So far, I’m proud I have this rotating coloured cube.

Anyways, that’s all for now. Stay tuned for my next update midway through in the first week of November.