As part of my goal to have monthly personal blog posts, here I am again! This semester seems to be flying by as it’s already Halloween.

This month has been very busy between exams, interviews, projects, RCOS, and Hacktoberfest. On the 14th, I wrote a blog post on the YACS blog detailing my decision to refactor the YACS Admin app into an Angular app. This has been going relatively smoothly, and the learning curve for TypeScript is definitely not as bad as I initially thought. In fact, it is so much nicer than JavaScript! Jasmine syntax is also somewhat similar to Mocha/Chai and I’ve used Karma and Protractor before, so that also lowered the learning curve quite a bit.

Today I finished my last pull request for Hacktoberfest, and it was quite a learning experience. Even though I’ve been in an open source organization for five semesters, most RCOS projects and contributions are mainly internal. I learned a lot about getting involved in external open source projects, which is a valuable skill to have. Through the projects I’ve contributed to, I also learned about Reddit bots and contributed my own knowledge on Django and analog circuits. I would definitely recommend participating in Hacktoberfest, as there are plenty of issues open even for newcomers!

November seems like yet another busy month, but after this month, it’s definitely something I can handle.