roncli.com blog: Open Source Adventures

One thing I've always appreciated is open source software initiatives. Of course, in the beginning it was more an appreciation of "thank you for letting me use your stuff for free" without giving back. Over time, though, I've embraced the promise of open source. With LibWowAPI, I put out a .NET library that some found useful enough to contribute back to the project. It's awesome when you get other people interested in what you do.

Another thing I've grown to love is bleeding edge technology. While it took me forever to adapt .NET, I'm now always keeping on top of the latest and greatest technologies.

With these shifts in mentality, I've managed to learn things like Node.js and rendr simply by diving in and trying them. But lately, just trying hasn't been enough.

I've moved the source code of roncli.com to GitHub, and with it is a new Node.js code base that uses rendr. I just recently finished the login, registration, and forgot password work flows, which was a big step. But now I've sidetracked myself into upgrading the tools that rendr uses.

Specifically, I came up on an issue with Browserify and Grunt. I upgraded Browserify and some of its dependencies to the latest version, but this completely broke rendr, even when I fixed my configuration files to work with the latest version of everything.

It took me a couple of days, but ultimately I found the problem was mainly lack of Windows compatibility with some of the dependent projects these bigger projects use. Since ultimately I plan to have my website on a Windows server but want to have the flexibility to move to another server if I need to, I debugged the issue and found that there were three separate projects that had bugs.

Within two days, I have created three pull requests to fix the issues I am seeing, all with the goal of getting rendr to work with the latest and greatest of all the modules rendr is using. It's kind of cool, because contributing back to these projects means I'm not only helping myself, but hopefully I'll be helping a lot of other people out in the future as well.

Labels: Browserify, Coding, Grunt, LibWowAPI, Node, Open Source, Rendr, roncli.com

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