Hi there! My name is Bregwin, and I am starting this blog as a part of the Open-Source Development course (OSD600) at Seneca College. Of course, I'm hoping to continue blogging here even after graduation and share cool things I find.

I wanted to take this course because in all my personal projects, there is at least one open source library that made it possible to develop it. I find it really admirable that people are freely sharing their work with the world so that others can also use it and improve upon it. It feels like it captures the essence of the internet where people from any part of the world can come together and share information.

I also felt bad that I haven't given anything back despite using so many open-source libraries, so I found this course as a perfect opportunity to do so.

Ultimately by the end of this course, I hope to learn more about how to contribute to Open-Source, get better at navigating and understanding large complex codebases and make good pull requests. Ideally, I want to work on open-source projects that I plan to use in my personal projects since I would be familiar with it and can provide helpful improvements to it.

For this week I was asked to research about a trending repo on Github I found interesting, so I looked into NocoDB, which is an open-source alternative to Airtable. If you are not familiar with apps like Airtable/NocoDB, it is basically like a supercharged excel sheet that can be used in a variety of ways like forms, project planning, tracking inventory and low code apps.

I believe lots of small companies just starting, tend to use excel spreadsheets to manage all their critical information when they really should be using a database. But databases tend to be very complex and intuitive for the average user. It is also very easy for critical data to be deleted with a wrong command. Having a user-friendly interface like NocoDB could make a big difference to end-users. The best part is that you can self-host it if you want so you can be in control of your data.

Unfortunately, it seems like the project is vastly above the scope of what I can make a meaningful contribution to within the timeframe of this semester. I am also not familiar with Vue which is being used for the frontend. But I am glad that I found it since I have been looking for a free alternative to Airtable that can be self-hosted.

I will keep looking into other projects to work on and sharing things I find interesting so stay tuned!

Photo by Lukas: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-encoding-in-laptop-574071/