Fourth month of the year. It’s very interesting to review my activities each month because it gives me a sense of accomplishment and forces me to remember what I want to achieve and where I want to go. It’s not easy to have a clear vision of what or where you are going if it’s only in your mind. Writing your goals and celebrating little progress along the way can help you stay motivated and focused.

In the last review, I wrote that I wanted to add one of two habits to my daily routine. It was not easy, when I woke up I wrote one page, in a small notebook, a few lines, every morning in English only to force me to start the day using English, writing some things about my current day or about the previous one. I realised that it is also useful to think about little things doing in my days. Another habit I added was to spend 30 minutes studying something about IT. I started with React and continued with Three.js. I restarted the Three.js course Three.js Journey. This time from the beginning because it's time to explore this topic further. I think that maybe it can be my topic. There are a lot of things that I like about 3D, designing models, creating scenes and apps, and there are lots of things I have to learn. I think that having a goal or an idea of what you want to create is the right incentive to study and learn new things. I don’t know if I’ll be able to maintain this personal commitment but for now, I’ll try to go on. Another habit that I wanted to add was to spend time to improve English with an app but I failed completely. I need to try another way to do it.

This month I needed to create eslint rules for work. I like eslint and the idea of using linters to create clean code. In the past, I used Prettier to format code, I found it very useful to start to give a sense to my code style, but with eslint is possible to do better because you can define the structure and the rules that your code needs to follow. You can decide, for example, if you want to use standard functions or arrow functions, you can add react hook rules if you want warnings when you are using hooks wrong, or you can add TS rules and so on. The best part is that you can create custom rules and check what you want. I tried and created some custom rules, to do that I followed some posts, one of this is how to write custom eslint rules and I found typescript-eslint library. If you are interested in this topic I suggest you follow one of the library contributors Josh Goldberg on Twitter and on Twitch where sometimes he works on the library live. I found this idea very interesting to share the code with other people, to involve and engage them to contribute and work on it. It’s also a practical way to show how you can work on an open source project. So far, I have made a small pull request (PR) on the library documentation. People often underestimate the value of documentation contributions. However, if a library is not properly documented, it can lose potential contributors due to lack of clarity about its purpose and functionality. Contributing to documentation is also a great way to get started and gradually become involved in an open-source project.

Another contribution I had done this month was on react-hook-form documentation, one of the examples showed wasn’t correct and I fixed it because it’s important you can try the library following the example the official documentation gives you, it’s the starting point to use it and if it’s not working you can’t understand it.

The last contribution of this month is to the Cheshire Cat project. It’s a very interesting project, as you can read in the Readme, “if you want to build a custom AI on top of a language model, the Cat can help you”. I contributed to creating the plugin page on the frontend. The project is a work in progress and I don’t know anything about AI but I found a way to contribute with my skills.

I apologize if I've spent too many words discussing open source contributions, but I feel it's crucial to do so. After all, I use these libraries and projects on a daily basis, and it's important to give back to the people who have spent a lot of time simplifying and improving my work. Contributing to open source projects is also a way of showing appreciation for the hard work of others and showing support for their efforts.

This month I attended two events. One is the CSSday, an event, as the name says dedicated to the CSS, which I enjoyed because sometimes we underestimate CSS and its potential to create better frontend, it's a language and we can create a lot of awesome things with it. The second event was about open source licensing, a really interesting topic for open source lovers or aspiring developers of libraries or projects. If I have enough time I may try to create a post summarizing this topic.

The last, and perhaps most important, thing I did this month was take four days off. It's important for all of us to take time to change our surroundings, interrupt our work, relax, and recharge our batteries so we can restart with renewed energy and drive.

I'm looking forward to what next month has in store for me.

I hope you enjoyed it, see ya!😎