Today I'm starting a course I've been looking forward to for a while.

My name is Uday, and I'm a student in the 5th semester of the Computer Programming & Analysis diploma at Seneca Polytechnic in Ontario, Canada.

OSD600, or Topics in Open Source Development is a course at Seneca Polytechnic where I will learn to work in open-source by contributing to large open-source projects. As part of this course, I'm starting a weekly blog about my experiences.

I'd first heard of this course from my peers in higher semesters (who have since graduated), who sang its praises as one of the best courses for learning real-world skills.

Working on open source projects to learn from more experienced developers and familiarize myself with best practices sounds like a fantastic learning experience and I cannot wait to get into it. Being able to add large projects to my resume is something I look forward to, but as of now, clicking onto a repository and seeing tens of thousands of lines of code leaves me scratching my head wondering where to even begin. That said, I'm confident that as I begin to explore the open-source world I'll warm up to the idea and, through this course, gain the skills to be able to dive into the projects I find interesting. The idea of working on projects that I could see myself using (or maybe even have used in the past) is very exciting to me.

For this blog post, I was asked to choose a repository to write about from the trending page on GitHub. I chose Coolify, which is a program that makes it easy to host applications and databases on your own hardware, offering an alternative to services like Heroku/Vercel/Netlify. I became familiar with the program through a friend who generously offered to let me host a Discord bot I was working on on his server, on which he had set up Coolify. I was able to host my bot with little technical knowledge, thanks to the program - it was as easy as deploying a website on Vercel. Unfortunately I don't own a server to run it on, but I think it would be amazing to work on nonetheless, especially since I'd get to see the benefits for myself.

However, I don't think I'll be contributing to this repo in this course, since it seems to be primarily written in PHP, which is a language I've never used. I'm a bit apprehensive of learning a new programming language while trying to keep up with my course work, so for this course, I'm leaning towards projects that use languages I'm already familiar with, like JavaScript or C++.

Either way, I'm looking forward to learning a lot this semester and can't wait to see what comes next.