OpenJS In Action Archives - OpenJS Foundation

Oct 07

Love7

Electron Update: Community Discord Server and Hacktoberfest

By rromoff Blog, Electron, Project Update

This blog was originally posted on the Electron blog. Electron is an Impact Project at the OpenJS Foundation.

Community Discord Server and Hacktoberfest

Join us for community bonding and a month-long celebration of open-source.

Electron Community Discord Launch

Electron’s Outreach Working Group is excited to announce the launch of our official community Discord server!

Why a new Discord server?

In its early days as the backbone of the Atom text editor, community discussion on the Electron framework occurred in a single channel in Atom’s Slack workspace. As time passed and the two projects were increasingly decoupled, the relevance of the Atom workspace to the Electron project decreased, and maintainer participation in the Slack channel declined in the same manner.

Up until now, we had still been redirecting our broader community to the Atom Slack workspace, even though we’ve had many reports from folks who have had trouble receiving invitations, and few of our core maintainers were frequenting the channel.

We’re setting up this shiny new server to be a central discussion hub for the community where you can get the latest news on all things Electron.

Get in here!

So far, the server’s membership consists of a few maintainers who have been working together to set it up, but we’re so excited to chat with you all! Come ask for help, keep up to date with Electron releases, or just hang out with other developers. We’ve got a handy invite for you that’ll give you access to the server!

Hacktoberfest 2020

As a large and long-running open-source project, Electron wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without all the contributions from its community, from code submissions to bug reports to documentation changes, and much more. That’s why we believe in the importance of participating in Hacktoberfest to usher in a wider community of developers of all skill levels into the project.

Odds and ends

This year, we don’t have a wider project to give you all to work on, but we’d like to focus on opportunities to contribute across the Electron JavaScript ecosystem.

Look out for issues tagged hacktoberfest across our various repositories, including the main electron/electron repository, the electron/electronjs.org website, electron/fiddle, and electron-userland/electron-forge!

P.S. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, we also have a backlog of issues marked with help wanted tags if you’re looking for more of a challenge.

Stuck? Come chat with us!

Moreover, it’s also no coincidence that the grand opening of our Discord server coincides with the largest celebration of open-source software of the year. Check out the #hacktoberfest channel to ask for help on your Hacktoberfest PR. In case you missed it, here’s the invite link again!

Have feedback on this post? Let @electronjs know on Twitter.

Need help or found a bug? Contact us.

Sep 30

Love15

OpenJS In Action: ESRI powering COVID-19 response with open source

By rromoff Blog, Case Study, Dojo, ESLint, Grunt, OpenJS In Action

The OpenJS In Action series features companies that use OpenJS Foundation projects to develop efficient, effective web technologies.

Esri, a geographic information systems company, is using predictive models and interactive maps with JavaScript technologies to help the world better understand and respond to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, they have built tools that visualize how social distancing precautions can help reduce cases and the burden on healthcare systems. They have also helped institutions like Johns Hopkins create their own informational maps by providing a template app and resources to extend functionality.

Esri uses OpenJS Foundation projects such as Dojo Toolkit, Grunt, ESLint and Intern to increase developer productivity and deliver high-quality applications that help the world fight back against the pandemic.

Esri’s contributions to the COVID response effort and an explanation of how they created the underlying technologies are available at this video:

https://youtu.be/KLnht-1F3Ao

Robin Ginn, Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation, spoke with Kristian Ekenes, Product Engineer at Esri, to highlight the work his company has been doing. Esri normally creates mapping software, databases and tools to help businesses manage spatial data. However, Ekenes started work on a tool called Capacity Analysis when the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread.

Capacity Analysis is a configurable app that allows organizations to display and interact with results from two scenarios predicting a hospital’s ability to meet the demand of COVID-19 patients given configurable parameters, such as the percentage of people following social distancing guidelines. Health experts can create two hypothetical scenarios using one of two models: Penn Medicine’s COVID-19 Hospital Impact Model for Epidemics (CHIME) or the CDC’s COVID-19Surge model. Then they can deploy their own version of Capacity Analysis to view how demand for hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators varies by time and geography in each scenario. This tool is used by governments worldwide to better predict how the pandemic will challenge specific areas.

During the interview, Ekenes spoke on the challenges that come with taking on ambitious projects like Capacity Analysis. Esri has both a large developer team and a diverse ecosystem of applications. This makes it difficult to maintain consistency in the API and SDKs deployed across desktop and mobile platforms. To overcome these challenges, Esri utilizes several OpenJS Foundation projects including Dojo Toolkit, Grunt, ESLint and Intern.

Ekenes explained that Grunt and ESLint increase developer productivity by providing real-time feedback when writing code. The linter also standardizes work across developers by indicating when incorrect practices are being used. This reduces the number of pull requests between collaborators and saves time for the entire team. Intern allows developers to write testing modules and create high-quality apps by catching bugs early. In short, Esri helps ensure consistent and thoroughly tested applications by incorporating OpenJS Foundation projects into their work.