Thursday, June 19, 2014

A month on MetaCPAN - A challenge on User Experience.

I confess that I forgot to update the blog about my work, I didn't realize that I started this program for  a month today. Some says that the enjoyable time always go by so fast, I believe that's true.


My 2nd and 3rd week was about improve User Experience by fixing front-end bug such as unpleasant result in autocomplete, suggestion when user search with missing colon or guideline for Task::Kensho for CPAN beginners. Fortunately, most of my issue can incorporate in to the same pull request.


The very challenge things for me was that I worked a lot the front end stuff, I wrote a lot of CSS and JavaScript that I'm not familiar with but now I'm confident to say that I'm getting better at it. After finished issue about new look of no result page and introducing a new autocomplete plugin. Working on front-end stuffs is fun for me now :)


Everything didn't goes smoothly overall. I also had a trouble with upgrading to Bootstrap 2 to 3 that I have volunteered. I just realize it was a big change of Bootstrap many properties have been removed and rewritten.  It was a time consumed task for me to finish it and I wouldn't be able to finish my schedule if I worked on the Bootstrap upgrading only. So I had to skip it for a while and I can go back to finish it if I have time left which I really want to. Using Bootstrap new version will help my work easier and more colorful I think.


One of the thing I like in working on MetaCPAN is that there are people not only my mentors but other contributors or users to give me feed back of my work whether they like it or not and sometime with suggestion that I could bring to improve and result in better work. I like to get feedback from people and I like people review my code event it is a negative feedback. I always appreciate negative feedback with reason or suggestion.  


This week I have been working on User account -- this is also my new challenge. As I am a newbie for Open Source world. I confess that the time that I applied for OPW application was the first time that I got to know Open ID since they required the email account from Open ID service providers. And now, I trying to make MetaCPAN accept login via Open ID which is the URL. I’m a bit struggling with this task and trying to research about how it works in order to introduce it MetaCPAN application.


Now, I’m also managing to participate in some of YAPC I want to try to submit a talk about my work in OPW program. But I’m not sure if I can afford for that. I also apply for Send-a-newbie program and if I’m lucky I will be at YAPC::EU in Sofia, Bulgaria.  I’ll pray for that :)