std::cout << "Hello World!";
Tags: opensource, beginners, github, git
Published: 2022-09-06 17:45:35

Sep 6 2022

## About Batu,
I'm a versatile developer, passionate about open source and Hackathons! Currently in my final year (semester 6) of CPA program in Seneca College and living in Toronto. While studying for semester 5 I have worked as a Research Assistant over the summer in Seneca Innovation. 
The industry partner was trying to automate the customer on-boarding process which was heavily manual. They wanted us to create a seamless onboarding experience for the customers using Optical _Character Recognition Technology_ (OCR) and _Artificial Intelligence_ (AI). Through this work I was able to get my very first experience with using _Amazon Web Services_ (AWS) and various open-source computer vision technologies. This was a remarkable experience for me as I worked with my partner [Samina](https://github.com/saminarp) to develop this real-world application. Later, it led both of us to be more confident in exploring new technologies without fear!
## Overview
While there have been numerous Hackathons that I have participated in and won several of them, I don't have much of open-source projects I have contributed to, I don’t have that "fanatical open-sourcer" experience yet. I joined GitHub in 2020 and treated it as a platform where I could store my heavy projects in the cloud and deploy them on the internet. It also had an adorable octocat logo, so I was enjoying the platform. As the time passes, I found it fascinating as it is all about open source. The various features of the platform (forking, browsing through the trends, staring repos) encourages you to contribute to the projects, especially, the cool green graph that is in your GitHub dashboard representing the activity overview showing the breakdown of Commits, Code review, Issues, PR. 
## Short story
In the beginning of this year (semester 4) I pushed myself to contribute into one project and the only reason was to see how my activity overview graph would react to it. After hours of browsing through the Issues tab, I was able to find this repo - [volder](https://github.com/devSupporters/volder) and contribute to it! which lets you describe data. I recall that my contribution was related to validation of email using Regex. 
### It worked! 
After approval, my PR went up in 35% and my graph was finally different; it was slanting downwards, showing my first contribution proudly, rather than a flat x-axis. The feeling was rewarding, though it didn't last long. After enrolling into professional courses in the 5th semester, I neglected open-source development, consumed by my regular coursework, my graph almost looking like a boring line again… Thus, I chose OSD600, surely my activity overview graph can be cool again and I am aware that contributing and reading code is a pathway to become qualified software developer. Over this term I am determined to play a major role on open source.
## Forked projects
* __Trending project__: [Sherlock](https://github.com/batunpc/sherlock)
  * It is a command line tool written in Python and it lets you find usernames across almost all social networks. This is appealing and useful in many ways! After testing this repo from scratch with my own username, I have found some of my forgotten social accounts. This ability might be useful when you want to shut down your account that are no longer in use. In another glance it might be potentially useful for penetration testers, as they would require as much information possible for their target.
* __AI related__: [Tesseract.js](https://github.com/batunpc/tesseract.js)
  * It is a JavaScript library that extracts texts from images. There is an abundance of OCR engines, but tesseract was one of the open-source OCR engines I have tested during my work at Seneca as Research Assistant.