Contributing to Open Source - Week 3

Happy new year! Incredibly, almost three years have passed since the COVID pandemic started, it brought a radical change to our lifestyle (both good and bad) but we have to adapt to the new circumstances and keep going forward. Being flexible is very important nowadays.

Thanks to the surge in remote work, I was able to participate in Encora’s Apprentice Program. This year’s goals are focused on graduating from college, improving my career, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Remember to write down your goals for this year, it is proven that writing down your goals raise the possibilities of success.

This first few days of the year also mark the end of the third week of the Contributing to Open Source phase. Two big holidays were in the middle of the past days (Christmas and New Year) so the work done this week might be a little less compared to previous weeks, nevertheless, I had many learning opportunities which I will share here.

First of all, I want to talk about Facebook’s like button that is present on a lot of websites:

Apparently, according to Facebook’s policy, it is prohibited to change the brand’s assets more than the (measly) customization options provided by them: Like Button for the Web. That means that you can’t escape the characteristic blue color and the thumbs-up icon that many people instantly recognize. Don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent thing that people immediately recognize the brand, but it becomes a problem when your website’s style doesn’t match the colors, and including the button will make it stand out. Also, even if you wanted to customize the button, it is built server-side and only rendered via an iframe or a script within your website.

Additionally, I am learning about the Grid system used by the MUI framework to build better responsive components. It is based on CSS’s Flexbox and provides a useful system to organize two-dimensional layouts.

Regarding the fiftyone’s project issue I mentioned in the previous blog post, I had to learn about the Recoil JS library which helps with state management in React. Curiously, like React, it is also developed by Facebook; so, apart from their social plugins, they build and provide great open source tools, kudos to them.

That would be all for this week. Hopefully, this will be a year full of new learning opportunities; remember that a new year gives you new opportunities to grow, learn and experience things. This blog will be some kind of proof to myself that I am working towards my goals.

Best wishes for 2022!